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Housing in the News 2019–2026: article-level dataset and coverage tables
A dataset of housing news from a global news index, January 2019 – July 2026, built with the Prism News API (historical and real-time news, https://radar-api.fliarbi.com/news). Every row is one news article about housing: prices and rents, supply and construction, affordable and social housing, housing policy and housing finance. Each row carries its date, location, tone, editorial priority, themes and the organisations it names, plus a link that returns the full article through the API.
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Key findings
In a global news index, housing took a 24.6% smaller share of news coverage in 2020 than in 2019 (13.82 against 18.32 articles per 10,000 news articles), and its lowest monthly shares between January 2019 and July 2026 came in April and May 2020, at about 11.1 articles per 10,000.
Basis: Annual and monthly housing articles divided by all articles in the index for the same period; 248,239 matched articles in total.
The phrase "affordable housing" appeared in the opening text of 42,158 of 248,239 housing news articles published between January 2019 and July 2026 (16.98%), more than any other housing term in the index.
Basis: Per-term counts of the 33 reviewed housing phrases within the matched set; an article can use several phrases.
Of housing articles carrying a tone label between January 2023 and July 2026, 43.6% were negative in tone, 1.3 times the 33.6% negative share across all news in the same index, while 54.6% were positive.
Basis: Top sentiment label of each article, grouped into negative, neutral and positive; 99.8% of sampled articles carry a label.
Editors' priority ratings placed 59.8% of housing articles at critical priority (7 or higher on a 1–9 scale) between January 2023 and July 2026, 1.4 times the 42.6% share for all news.
Basis: Top priority label per article; critical = priority ≥ 7.
Zoning and land-use regulation appeared as a theme in 1.44% of themed housing articles between January 2023 and July 2026, 353.47 times its frequency in all themed news, and affordable-housing initiatives in 7.02%, 339.49 times their frequency.
Basis: Theme labels assigned to each article; lift against all themed news.
Charts and maps
Coverage by country
Primary location of located articles, January 2023 – July 2026. Lift = the country's share of this topic's news ÷ its share of all located news (above 1 = over-covered).
| Country | Articles | Share | Lift |
|---|---|---|---|
| United States | 38,680 | 48.31% | 1.0 |
| India | 9,201 | 11.49% | 0.87 |
| United Kingdom | 8,220 | 10.27% | 1.76 |
| Australia | 5,431 | 6.78% | 3.17 |
| Canada | 3,530 | 4.41% | 2.05 |
| China | 1,461 | 1.82% | 0.69 |
| Ireland | 1,342 | 1.68% | 2.32 |
| New Zealand | 1,294 | 1.62% | 2.5 |
| Nigeria | 1,088 | 1.36% | 0.99 |
| Singapore | 873 | 1.09% | 1.22 |
| Spain | 590 | 0.74% | 0.75 |
| France | 561 | 0.7% | 0.35 |
| Iceland | 451 | 0.56% | 4.78 |
| Ghana | 422 | 0.53% | 1.09 |
| Germany | 401 | 0.5% | 0.43 |
Use the API
This dataset was built with the Prism News API, which serves historical and real-time news. Install the command-line client, log in with an API key, and query the topic yourself:
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/fliarbi/prism-news-api/main/scripts/install.sh | bash
prism-news login
prism-news trends "affordable housing" --granularity monthly --tableCite
Fliar BI. Housing in the News 2019–2026: article-level dataset and coverage tables. January 2019 – July 2026. https://fliarbi.github.io/news-datasets/housing/