Housing affordability

What is this all about?

Each year, housing partners work together to update our understanding of the housing market locally. Part of this assessment includes looking at housing affordability.

We publish a range of information in our Strategic Housing Market Assessment, available at www.cambridgeshireinsight.org.uk/shma

Why release it as open data?

To make this data more useful, we are publishing it in open format. We have already published information about housing completions, and about housing partners and fuel poverty. This data on housing affordability continues this process.

This data sets out the percentage of residents of the Cambridge housing sub-region who are unable to afford housing, based on contemporary income data and housing costs, broken down into 1, 2 and 3 bedroom homes.

Where can I find out more?

The data, with supporting notes and comment, is all published in chapters of our strategic housing market assessment. The data comes from the following updates:

• SHMA 2013, based on 2011/12 data
• SHMA 2012, based on 2009/10 data
• SHMA 2010, based on 2008/9 data and
• SHMA 2009, based on mostly 2007/8 data

The information is used as part of our calculation for the need for affordable housing, particularly where we need to work out the percentage of people unlikely to be able to afford housing on the open market (either to to rent or to buy) and thus potentially in need of "sub market" or affordable housing products.

You can find this new affordability open data set here http://opendata.cambridgeshireinsight.org.uk/dataset/housing-affordability