The article deals with an analysis of regional differences in rental housing affordability following rent deregulation in the Czech Republic. The objective is to identify the types of households potentially at risk of being unable to afford housing, to map the development of potential housing (un)affordability since 2000, and to trace the development of regional differences in the percentage of at-risk households in the Czech Republic. Owing to the absence of useful aggregate data on incomes and expenditures for different household types in the regions of the Czech Republic, the authors created their own simulation methodology for measuring housing affordability, which uses available regional wage statistics and data on market rents. The results indicate that the general risk of being unable to afford rental housing and regional differences in housing affordability are both decreasing, but there is still a relatively large group of households that under current wage conditions for paying social benefits would be unable to afford to pay market rents.
The right to housing is derived from one of the most basic and natural human needs - the need to live someplace. However, its content is not only the ‚right to live‘, but is complemented by a complex of other interrelated and interdependent social and human rights, including, for example, the right to access to safe drinking water and sanitation, the right to access to resources, including the energy for cooking, heating and lighting, the right to privacy, the right to security, including security of tenure, and many others. Given its strong social dimension and its broad human rights dimension, it is therefore understandably the subject of attention in a number of major legal documents of international importance, which refer to fundamental human rights, social progress and better living conditions. Within the Slovak Republic, the right to housing is considered to be a social right with a special character, since it is not understood as an individual right claimable against society, but as a right based on the co-responsibility of society towards the citizen. Several provisions of public and private law serve to protect it. In private law, cases in which housing is provided in a dwelling that is not owned by the occupant, i.e. where the occupant lives in someone else‘s dwelling, are more sensitive. The extent to which such housing is protected is constantly debated and there is probably no ‚one right answer‘. When looking for a way to optimise the mutual rights and obligations of the landlord and tenant, it is advisable to look for inspiration (also) in foreign legislation which, on the one hand, takes into account the strong social charge of rental housing and the need to ‚protect the weaker‘, i.e. the tenant, but at the same time respects and mirrors the natural boundaries of traditional private law institutions - property rights and tenancy rights - in their legal and true essence.
JavaScript is turned off in your web browser. Turn it on to take full advantage of this site, then refresh the page.