Sustainable Housing Practices: Spatial Analysis of Housing Stress in Corvallis, Oregon

Abstract

America's Housing Affordability definition classifies those households as stressed that spend more than 30% of their net income on housing. This paper challenges the traditional economic criteria-based approach that ignores the social and environmental parameters. Authors offer a geographical information science (GIS)-based Multicriteria Decision Analysis, selecting Corvallis, Oregon to prove the applied impact of the proposed methodology. Using experiential literature and interviews with specialists, the research establishes a comprehensive set of housing stress indicators including demographic, housing quality, and commuting time variables. Raster overlay and zonal statistics were deployed to obtain the final housing stress map. The strain was highest in the low-density single-family zone that contained dilapidated housing and longer commuting times, in contrast the stress was lowest for the mixed-use residential. GIS results were then used to make recommendations for affordable housing by channelizing favorable allocation of resources through spatially targeted efforts. This innovative method has a great potential to prioritize improvements based on the accumulated stress scores for each zone and contributes toward the improvements in understanding, examining, and measuring housing stress worldwide.