The world has changed rapidly in recent months as a result of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on all areas of socio-economic life. The crisis directed, in a first phase, the efforts of the whole society in the direction of ensuring the public health, and later also towards the economic recovery by resuming the human activities. In this context, housing has been a point of stability and a starting point for all efforts, and access to adequate housing has proven its importance for ensuring the health and well-being of the population. The purpose of the research is to highlight a series of housing affordability problems pre-existent and new problems arising from the influence of the COVID-19 pandemic on the housing sector in Romania. The present research highlights pre-existing problems in the general picture of housing at the national level, how these issues condition access to adequate and affordable housing, the emergence of new risk groups in the population in terms of access to housing, highlights the impact of the pandemic on the ability of households to bear housing costs and proves that housing insecurity is exacerbated by the effects of the crisis. The analyzes used data provided by the National Institute of Statistics, Eurostat, the Quality of Life Research Institute as well as reports prepared by specialized European organizations.

The accessibility of housing is one of the challenges to which the global economy, and implicitly, the European economy, must respond from the perspective of ensuring sustainable socioeconomic development of contemporary society. This challenge is the result of problems whose manifestation has been accentuated in the last decades: increasing the rate of housing deprivation, limiting the access to housing for some social categories, emphasizing social exclusion and segregation. This study aims to identify, after a comparative analysis of the indicators associated with housing costs in the European Union and Romania, the main problems facing our country, as a state of the European Union, from the perspective of housing affordability. The research focuses on the study of housing conditions and the aspects that define the housing affordability in Romania and the European Union. Romania has a housing stock dominated by houses (70.3% of homes built before 1980), but which is not burdened by major deficiencies (regarding the number of homes, number of rooms, living space). The deficiencies of housing in Romania are related to overcrowding and severe housing deprivation. In terms of housing costs, the research showed a high degree of burden on Romanian households with housing costs, among the highest in the EU, seven out of ten households feel the financial burden of housing costs and only 6% of households are not affected. Data provided by Eurostat for the period 2010-2018 were used for the analysis.

This article aims to characterize the current situation of the housing stock on the territory of Rădăuți municipality as a result of the changes that occurred between 1990 and 2019 in its structure and characteristics and to synthesize a series of territorial disparities. The research aimed to highlight the general dynamics of the housing stock and capture the territorial changes that reflect the process of restructuring and regeneration that the city's housing stock has gone through in the last three decades. To achieve the purpose of the study, in analyzing the dynamics of the housing fund in Radauti, the following indicators were taken into account: number and type of existing housing, number of existing housing by the form of ownership and source of financing, the annual number of completed housing, housing, age of housing. The territorial analysis aimed to highlight the expansion of the built fund (especially in residential areas), highlight the distribution of housing in the city, identify structural changes in urban space as a result of the urban restructuring process that began after 1990. Highlighting the most significant quantitative and qualitative changes determined by the dynamics of the housing stock was based on the analysis, interpretation, and processing of bibliographic, cartographic, and statistical data. The graphic and cartographic representations obtained were the starting point for the subsequent analyzes and interpretations that allowed the characterization of the dynamics of the housing stock as well as the formulation of the study conclusions. The research results show that although most of the housing stock in Radauti was built before 1990, the restructuring process is current and is achieved both by densifying the built space and by a peripheral expansion of residential areas. The trends that can be underlined in the evolution of the housing stock of Rădăuți municipality are the increase of the share of individual dwellings in the overall housing fund, the formation of new residential neighborhoods dominated by individual dwellings, as a result of the construction of the collective housing on the vacant spaces inside, the renewal of the existing housing stock, the emergence of problems related to access to urban utilities.