Cluster-Weighted Analysis of Housing Tension in Italy: The Case of the Emilia-Romagna Region

In this article, we study the main determinants of housing tension, for the case of the Emilia-Romagna Region in Italy, by integrating administrative data sources and official statistics into a new dataset, which combines socio-demographic and wealth attributes with aspects of housing supply and housing market at a municipality level. This dataset is employed in conjunction with cluster-weighted models, able to handle both the intrinsic heterogeneity of local housing tension and the presence of mildly atypical municipalities. The obtained results demonstrate that a source of unobserved heterogeneity over space characterizes the dataset; they also confirm that wealth attributes play a significant role in determining housing tension, while the same result holds true for demographic and housing market aspects for only some of the clusters of municipalities detected by the analysis. This study also provides useful suggestions for the future development of housing policies in the Region in favor of families in need of public economic support in accessing social housing.