Abstract
This paper proposes a method for identifying households who need housing assistance using a concept of the term ‘affordability’ by Hancock (1993). We verify the existence of a household who could maintain an adequate housing in the rental housing market without requiring a significant sacrifice of other necessities, and keeps residence in public rental housing supplied by the local government. The indicator of affordability is represented by the multiple of the cost of the adequate housing, and then we present the definition of the rent-to-income ratio. Moreover, we derive the indicator for a given household type by hedonic approach. It is shown that at least 17 per cent of households in public housing are capable of securing affordable housing in the rental housing market with the present income.
