New Survey Module Aims to Capture Hidden Housing Poverty in Wealthier Nations

Poverty is often measured in dollars, but some of its most damaging forms never appear on a household budget sheet. A family may earn enough to stay above the poverty line while living in a damp, overcrowded apartment, fearing eviction, or paying more than half its income in rent. A new study published in Social Indicators Research by Adriana Conconi of the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative and Monserrat Serio of the Universidad Nacional de Cuyo tackles this blind spot, proposing a carefully designed survey module that would allow multidimensional poverty indices to capture housing-related deprivation in countries with higher levels of human development, where acute material want is rarer but housing insecurity is widespread.

The Global Multidimensional Poverty Index, developed by OPHI and the United Nations Development Programme, has reshaped how governments and researchers think about deprivation since its launch in 2010. By combining indicators of health, education, and living standards, it complements income-based measures and has informed policies aligned with the Sustainable Development Goals across more than one hundred countries. Yet the Global MPI was engineered for acute poverty. Its housing indicators, such as access to clean cooking fuel, improved sanitation, electricity, and adequate building materials, are calibrated to detect subsistence-level deficits. The 2024 edition covers 112 countries, of which only four are high-income, and in wealthier settings the index’s thresholds often fail to register the subtler deprivations that constrain well-being: unaffordable rents, insecure tenure, poor thermal comfort, or neighborhoods cut off from opportunity.

The conceptual foundation of the new proposal is the United Nations Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights’ 1991 definition of adequate housing, which identifies seven core elements: security of tenure; availability of services, materials, facilities, and infrastructure; affordability; habitability; accessibility; location; and cultural adequacy. The authors distill these into twelve indicators organized around five measurable subdimensions, deliberately excluding cultural adequacy and accessibility from the core index. Cultural adequacy, they argue, is too subjective and context-dependent to standardize, while accessibility needs, such as adaptations for household members with disabilities, apply only to a subset of households and are better handled as disaggregation variables than as universal index components.

One of the most striking contributions is the treatment of housing occupancy insecurity. The proposed composite indicator integrates irregular or informal tenure, payment-related insecurity, and prospective exposure to eviction, treating them as facets of a single underlying condition rather than separate deprivations. The evidence base for this choice is sobering. Prindex data show that perceived tenure insecurity has risen sharply in recent years, particularly in upper-middle- and high-income countries, and that in 2024 only 44 percent of adults across 108 countries considered themselves owners or joint owners of their primary residence, down from 49 percent in 2020. Habitat for Humanity estimates that more than 20 percent of the world’s population struggles to remain in their homes and more than 70 percent lack legal documentation of their property rights.

Eviction, the sharpest expression of tenure insecurity, carries consequences that ripple far beyond the loss of shelter. Research in the United States links eviction to heightened poverty risk, homelessness, adverse health outcomes, reduced earnings, and lasting damage to credit records, and children account for four out of every ten people threatened with eviction each year. Yet reliable eviction data are notoriously scarce. Administrative statistics are fragmented, often capturing only early procedural stages, and household surveys systematically underrepresent those who have been evicted. The authors propose a direct survey question on eviction risk, modeled on instruments such as the United States Household Pulse Survey, as a feasible way to capture this dimension. Notably, the indicator is designed to distinguish deprivation from lifestyle: it targets households that lack both ownership and any legally recognized secure tenure, avoiding the misclassification of voluntary renters, a group that includes many young, mobile professionals.

Affordability receives equally careful treatment. Housing cost overburden, already a standardized metric in the European Union through the EU-SILC survey, measures the share of household disposable income absorbed by housing costs. The scale of the problem is global: Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies reports that 31.5 percent of United States households spend more than 30 percent of income on housing, while UN-Habitat finds that 55.4 percent of households in Sub-Saharan Africa exceed the same threshold. Because many surveys used for poverty measurement lack reliable income data, the authors recommend expenditure-share or residual-income approaches consistent with European and OECD practice, while acknowledging the conceptual tension this introduces with the capability framework that underpins most multidimensional poverty indices.

The module also modernizes the housing dimension for the digital age. Limited access to digital communication and information joins the indicator set, reflecting how connectivity now shapes education, employment, financial inclusion, and social participation. Internet usage exceeds 90 percent in high-income countries but falls to just 25 percent in low-income countries, and housing characteristics such as tenure insecurity and infrastructure quality can prevent households from investing in reliable service. Evidence from deprived communities shows that introducing household internet access improves mental well-being, social connectedness, and employment prospects, particularly among the elderly and those with low educational attainment. By focusing on household-level infrastructure rather than digital literacy, the indicator captures structural barriers without straying beyond the housing dimension.

Physical conditions remain central to the proposal. Overcrowding is measured through two complementary standards: a room-based threshold of more than one person per room and minimum floor-area benchmarks drawn from recent research on spatial requirements, proposing 30 square meters for single-person households, 45 for couples, and 60 for households of three or more. The health stakes are well documented, from the transmission of infectious diseases to persistent negative effects on children’s academic achievement and behavior. Inadequate housing conditions, including dampness, leaks, and structural damage, are captured through a combination of interviewer observation and self-reported questions with a one-year reference period, a design choice that catches seasonal problems such as rain-driven leaks. Thermal adequacy is framed neutrally as protection against both cold and heat, ensuring relevance in tropical climates where cooling, not heating, is the primary concern, a critical distinction given that energy poverty now affects roughly one in ten low-income households even in affluent Northern European countries.

The proposal extends beyond the front door to the neighborhood itself, incorporating indicators of crime context and environmental quality. Decades of research on neighborhood effects, including landmark studies tracking families who moved from extreme-poverty areas, show that children exposed to higher-opportunity neighborhoods experience lasting gains in education and earnings, while local crime depresses mental health and life satisfaction even among those never directly victimized. Environmental indicators cover pollution, water reliability, waste management, and access to services, with the authors noting that self-reported low water pressure correlates strongly with illness across multiple countries. Methodological honesty pervades the paper: the authors flag recall bias, seasonality, urban-rural asymmetries, and the risk of double counting, and they recommend excluding crime indicators where objective data are unavailable or unreliable.

The authors are candid about the module’s limitations. It has not yet been empirically tested, and its thresholds, potential redundancy with existing dimensions, and sensitivity to context all require validation across countries. Homelessness, which a systematic review links to mortality rates between three and eleven times higher than those of housed populations in high-income countries, remains beyond the reach of household surveys and demands complementary data strategies. Cultural adequacy awaits deeper treatment. Even so, the paper represents a significant step toward poverty measurement that reflects how deprivation actually manifests in middle- and high-income societies, where the housing crisis is less about missing walls and more about the precarity of the ones people live behind. If adopted, the module could give policymakers a standardized, comparable lens on the housing deprivations that income statistics alone will never reveal.

Subject of Research: A proposed survey module for measuring housing and essential services deprivation in multidimensional poverty indices for higher human development countries

Article Title: Housing and Access to Essential Services Indicators: a Proposed Survey Module for Multidimensional Poverty Measurement

Article References: Conconi, A., & Serio, M. (2026). Housing and Access to Essential Services Indicators: a Proposed Survey Module for Multidimensional Poverty Measurement. Social Indicators Research, 185(1), Article 1. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-026-03907-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s11205-026-03907-8

Keywords: multidimensional poverty, housing deprivation, survey methodology, tenure security, housing affordability, eviction, sanitation, digital connectivity, overcrowding, energy poverty, neighborhood effects, social indicators