Perceived Housing Space Overconsumption: Empirical Evidence for Switzerland

Abstract

In Switzerland, living space consumption per person has been increasing for years. Besides structural causes, the overconsumption of living space is one of the determinants. After theoretical considerations, we first use an empirical model to explain the subjective overconsumption of living space of households, and we include household-, dwelling- and residence-specific determinants in our model. The sample is based on the Swiss Household Panel. Our analyses show that nearly 10 % of the Swiss households live in a dwelling that they consider as too large. These households exhibit statistically significant differences with regard to most determinants of subjective overconsumption of living space in comparison to the rest of the sample. The logit estimations show that mainly older households and single-person households are characterised by the largest subjective overconsumption of living space. In a second step, we propose a method based on conditional probabilities to estimate the subjective overconsumption of living space on the neighbourhood level in a city in case there are no information available on the subjective overconsumption of living space. We use a dataset from the Federal Office of Statistics. Their analyses show that about 6 % of the households in Lucerne consider their dwelling as too large. Furthermore, the different neighbourhoods are characterised by a large heterogeneity. Accordingly, effective measures to address the subjective overconsumption should be implemented on a local level.