Housing is a unique basic need due to its location specificity: house prices and rents differ across
municipalities and neighbourhoods, and location affects access to work, education, amenities,
and other aspects of daily life. Still, housing affordability is often assessed at the national level,
which risks overlooking local variation. Local-level comparisons are especially vital in countries
with diverse housing markets, but they are often hampered by data limitations. This article
addresses this gap by exploring a simplified microsimulation, the Model Family Method (MFM),
to compare housing affordability across cities. Using Finland as a case study, the analysis focuses
on low-wage private rental sector tenants in 11 cities in 2019. It combines the MFM with two
common affordability measures: rent burdens (rent-to-income ratio) and housing-induced
poverty (residual income). The results show that no family fell into housing-induced poverty
when social security was included, but moderate rent overburdens were common, especially in
the Helsinki Metropolitan Area. However, the findings also indicate precarity in affordability:
sudden changes in expenses or income could render housing unaffordable for most model families,
particularly those more reliant on social security. The article concludes that the MFM provides
a valuable tool for comparing local housing affordability in the absence of suitable survey data,
and has the additional benefit of splitting household income and expenses in detail. Methods
like the MFM show potential for supporting planning policies that are sensitive to local needs
and conditions, while illustrating the nexus of location, housing, the labour market, and the
welfare state.