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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 benefi ts would be unable to afford to pay market rents.

The article attempts to examine the main topics in the sociological study of housing from the end of the Second World War to the 1980s & distinguishes the following five: (1) housing systems & housing policy, (2) the relationship between social stratification & housing differentiation, (3) the relationship between the family & housing, (4) the relationship between housing & neighbourhoods, & (5) housing & architecture as components of culture. During this period the sociological study of housing was strongly influenced by the changes occurring in the housing situation. The post-war housing shortage in Europe & the state's heavy involvement in tackling this problem, along with the rapid rise in the importance of social housing, led to an emphasis on the study of housing systems, housing policy, the methodology of quantitatively measuring housing needs, & the role of the state in the housing sphere, with a heavy stress on the economic dimension of housing issues. A shift to qualitative research on housing, i.e. studying the relationship between the family & housing & the housing needs of the elderly & new families, occurred as the housing shortage declined. Culturally oriented housing research followed, as a response to the search for new identities & for genius loci. As housing has become commodified in Europe & social housing has almost disappeared over the past twenty-five years, there has been revival of the study of the social consequences of narrowly defined economic concepts of housing policy.

This article deals first with the relative affordability of owner-occupied housing in Prague compared to the situation in the Czech Republic in general. The relative position of Prague in this region is then assessed in a cross-national comparison and determined to be specific. The article's main objective is to uncover the main demand factors behind the high prices and the low affordability of owner-occupied housing in Prague. The authors focus on factors that derive from the specifi c economic position of Prague and the specific culturally-rooted preferences of Czech citizens for owner-occupied housing. Findings from numerous sociological studies and experiments have proved both of these factors to be very important, and their future development will thus largely be influenced by the affordability of housing in Prague.

Around the end of the 1970s, studies began to emerge that focused on people's satisfaction with their housing, especially among tenants in social housing (tenant surveys). Gradually, research on people's housing satisfaction acquired a much broader context & it began to be conducted on national samples of respondents. In the 1980s the theoretical foundations of this field of study were established, & thanks to the spread of multi-dimensional statistical methods the analysis of housing satisfaction became the subject of numerous research projects around the world. The aim of this article is to describe, as precisely as possible, & using multi-dimensional statistical methods & structure modelling, the process that produces housing satisfaction in the Czech Republic & to trace the main factors behind its variability. The article draws on data from the National Housing Attitudes survey conducted in 2001.

Using data from the representative survey Housing Attitudes 2001 the author analyses the opinions of the Czech population on the situation in the housing market & general attitudes towards housing-related issues & housing policy. The article focuses on uncovering the connections between attitudes towards various aspects of housing policy & the respondents' positions in the housing market. On the basis of the results of the analyses the usefulness of the theory of 'housing classes' in the Czech context is discussed.