Bringing new ideas to housing research

Land costs play a pivotal role in housing affordability but are often misrepresented in urban research. This pilot study assesses land price shifts and their implications for housing affordability in Volos, Greece, through GIS-based interpolation. Price surfaces were modelled using 2022 land plot price data and geostatistically validated to be used as a baseline. Comparison with 2024 data reveals rising land prices in areas where land was previously affordable, highlighting a growing challenge to housing affordability. This study also shows that land costs can be effectively monitored using geostatistics and price mapping, even in smaller and imperfect markets. This research contributes to the literature on spatially informed real estate analysis in less-studied areas with limited real estate data.

This short paper revisits and revises the over-used State-Market-Household triangle as a theoretical analytical tool, proposing its repositioning at the centre of Housing and Welfare Studies, and reopening the debate. It is shown that this tool does not remain useful for researchers alone but also as a means to a more effective communication of results to a wider non-specialist audience. Towards this goal two conceptual adaptations are proposed. Firstly, the addition of the time parameter in assessing the triangle’s transformations from one era to another, or comparing systems with similarities but on different evolutionary phases. Secondly, the – by default – understanding of the triangle as a dynamic configuration, due to inter and intra-polar shifts.