2.3.1. Housing Costs

Europe, 2015). This factor has deepened the debt of the younger population and lowered their buying capacity (Housing Europe, 2015).

There are several major issues that influence the affordability of housing in Romania, such as: the housing costs, overcrowding, poor quality dwellings, imbalanced home ownership, the house market, and a low number of social housing. These will be detailed in the next sections.

2.3.1. Housing Costs

Between 1993 and 2007 many people moved to the villages and in the surrounding areas of the cities because of the housing costs (TENLAW,2014). In the EU, the average housing costs between 2004 and 2014 raised by 3.6%, while in Romania, it did by 8.9% (Eurostat, 2015). In the last 10 years, Romania has had a GDP growth of 3.4 percentages and in 2016 it is forecast at 5.2%, which is one of the highest in the EU, the average being 1.7% (Economic and Financial Affairs, 2016). It is possible that this growth and the increasing need of adequate housing (see section 2.3) have led to an increase in housing costs.

There is a discrepancy found in the data when it comes to the housing costs overburden. The data from 2015 shows that the European tenants, who pay the market rent price, are prone to use more than 40% on the housing costs (Ciora, 2015). According to Ciora (2015), 26.2% tenants that rent in EU are affected, whilst only 6.8% of home owners deal with this issues (Ciora, 2015). Taking this in consideration, it would be expected that in Romania because 96.4% of the people own their home (see Figure 6), there would be a low level of housing costs overburden. On the contrary, Romania is in the first 5 countries in the EU as percentage of population being overburden, with 15.1% (see Figure 3). The Eurostat statistics show that 11.2% of the EU population used 40% or more of their disposal income on housing, which is considered overburdened (see Figure 3).