Beyond Affordability: A Multifaceted Index for Rental Housing Availability

This paper develops a novel conceptual and methodological framework for understanding rental housing availability, addressing a gap in both academic and policy discourse on housing accessibility. While affordability remains the dominant lens through which rental housing is assessed, such approaches often fail to fully capture the critical influence of supply-side dynamics. Focusing on the Polish rental housing market, this study introduces the Rental Housing Availability Index (RHAI), a multidimensional index that integrates tenant income, rental prices, and supply trends to assess the actual availability of rental housing. The empirical findings demonstrate that rental availability is shaped less by absolute income levels and more by the interplay between changes in supply and rental prices. The RHAI effectively captures market disruptions, including exogenous shocks that trigger sudden contractions in availability despite improvements in affordability. The index’s sensitivity to dynamic factors reveals the inadequacy of income-only metrics and offers a more robust tool for ongoing monitoring of rental market conditions. By reframing availability as a function of both affordability and supply, the study contributes a more precise analytical lens for diagnosing constraints in rental housing access.