Housing Status, Housing Expenditures, and Satisfaction with Housing Quality

This paper is an investigation of the relationship between monthly housing expenditures and satisfaction with quality of housing among renters, owners with mortgages, and owners with no mortgages. The sample includes 592 Iowa husband-and-wife families in the age range from 18 to 60. The data are from a systematic random sample collected from 13 small cities during 1975 and 1976. The analyses include correlation and regression.Housing expenditures are positively related to family size, income, and education. The monthly housing expenditures for the renter with average characteristics is $159.91; for the owner with no mortgage, $95.42; for owners with a mortgage, $206.59. Satisfaction with housing quality is positively related to family size, age, education and housing expenditures. Renters are less satisfied with housing quality than are either owners with a mortgage or owners with a paid-off mortgage. However, for renters, the satisfaction increases as a function of expenditures at a faster rate than it does for owners with and without mortgages.