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Reusing vacant buildings for housing

Created on 14-11-2024

Design, planning and building Policy and financing
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In the context of budget austerity, public entities have tended to sell their vacant properties (both buildings and land) to private developers. The first challenge would be to rehabilitate these properties in order to limit new construction and urban sprawl. This rehabilitation should aim for zero environmental impact, but it is very expensive. To find a financial balance, this cost is generally reflected in the high prices of the housing created, thus contributing to the affordable housing crisis. The main challenge would then be to find a financial and partnership arrangement that simultaneously addresses environmental criteria and local social issues in the rehabilitation. Social needs should be determined among the unmet needs for affordable housing and other needs of the local community or neighbourhood.

Systems knowledge

Actors

Architects and designers

Local communities

Local authorities

Local authorities, also known as local governments or municipal governments, are administrative bodies responsible for governing and providing services to specific geographic areas, such as cities, towns, or counties. They manage local public affairs, infrastructure, and policies, and are accountable to the residents within their jurisdiction.

Method

Interdisciplinary collaboration

Teams from different disciplines or fields work together to tackle complex problems, find innovative solutions and develop a broader understanding of a particular issue. This approach recognises that many real-world challenges cannot be adequately addressed within the confines of a single discipline or field.

Participatory action research

Participatory Action Research (PAR) is a research approach in which researchers collaborate with participants to collectively investigate and address real-world issues, emphasizing active involvement, social change, and empowerment.

Participant observation

Participant observation is a qualitative research method where a researcher actively immerses themselves in the environment or group being studied, often as a participant, to observe and document the social behaviors, interactions, and practices of the group, aiming to gain an insider's perspective and deeper understanding of the subject of research.

Financial sustainability

Financial sustainability of social or public rental housing projects refers to the capacity of these initiatives to maintain their operational and maintenance costs without over-reliance on external subsidies or resources, ensuring their long-term viability and ability to provide affordable housing.

Tools

Workshops

Workshops are structured and interactive sessions or gatherings in which participants engage in hands-on learning, problem-solving, and skill development related to a specific topic or activity. Workshops are typically conducted in a group setting and often involve practical exercises, discussions, and collaborative activities to achieve specific learning objectives.

Place-based research

Place-based research is a form of academic or investigative inquiry that focuses on a specific geographic location or area to understand its unique characteristics, challenges, and dynamics. It often involves examining the local context, culture, and environment to gain insights into issues, phenomena, or opportunities within that particular place.

Target knowledge

Topic

Social housing

It refers to housing units that are owned, operated, or subsidized by the government or non-profit organizations with the primary goal of providing affordable and secure accommodation to individuals and families with limited financial means. Social housing programs aim to address housing affordability and housing insecurity issues, especially for low-income or vulnerable populations.

Dimension

Institutional

The structure of government institutions that have the responsibility and power to create building regulation and monitor compliance with them

Environmental

This dimension focuses on understanding and addressing the environmental challenges and concerns related to human activities and their impact on the natural world.

Social

This dimension relates to aspects influencing or impacting people, communities, and societal structures.

Economic

Level

Building

The structure, project or development that is directly impacted by the various building regulations.

Municipal

This level refers to the local administrative or governmental unit, typically a city or town, responsible for local governance, services, and decision-making within a defined geographic area.

Neighborhood

Transformation Knowledge

Policy

Alternative form of housing provision

Related cases

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Related vocabulary

Affordability

Sustainability

Transdisciplinarity

Area: Policy and financing

Housing is usually deemed unaffordable when it consumes more than a set percentage of a household's monthly income. The Eurostat[1] and the OECD[2]  follow this threshold approach and define households overburdened with housing costs as those spending more than 40% of their disposable income on housing. However, this indicator fails to capture financial hardship, particularly among lower-income households. In fact, lower-income households may be spending less than 40% of their income on housing and yet failing to meet adequate consumption levels for other goods. As a response, the residual income approach ascertains housing (un)affordability by defining a minimum level of consumption for a set of goods according to particular household types. The residual income approach builds on consumption data to define the minimum level of income necessary for a household to survive after housing costs. The main shortcoming of this approach is that relies on subjective measures of what constitutes the necessary minimal expenses for a household. These two definitions of affordability navigate two tensions 1) between housing and other types of consumption and 2) between the individual conceptions and what is affordable and what government considers to be affordable (Haffner & Hulse, 2021). More recently, scholars have emphasized the multi-faceted nature of affordability to include commuting and transport costs together with energy costs (Haffner & Boumeester, 2015). Other approaches focus on supply-side measures, for instance on the share of the housing stock that a household can afford (Chung et al., 2018). Evolutions in the measurement of affordability bear witness to the complexity of housing systems. Affordability is not only dependant on housing consumption but also housing supply, particularly in inelastic markets where providers have considerable power. At the same time, displacement pressures and rising energy costs in an older and inefficient stock add pressure on households to access affordable housing. References Chung C., Evangelou N., Geyer J., Quint R., Keith I., Coates D., Daula T., Frumkin S., Leventis A. v, Doerner W. M., Roderer D., & Barba M. (2018). A New Home Affordability Estimate: What Share of Housing Stock Can Families Afford?. FHFA Staff Working Papers 18-04, Federal Housing Finance Agency. Haffner M., & Boumeester, H. (2015). Housing affordability in the Netherlands: the impact of rent and energy costs. Journal of Housing and the Built Environment, 30(2), 293–312. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10901-014-9409-2 Haffner M., & Hulse K. (2021). A fresh look at contemporary perspectives on urban housing affordability. International Journal of Urban Sciences, 25(S1), 59–79. https://doi.org/10.1080/12265934.2019.1687320   [1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-datasets/-/tessi165   [2] https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/624ee022-en/index.html?itemId=/content/component/624ee022-en#section-d1e6271  

Created on 15-07-2021

Author: A.Fernandez (ESR12), M.Haffner (Supervisor)

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Area: Community participation

Contemporary scholars generally accept the multidimensional understanding of sustainability - social, political, economic, cultural and environmental amongst other dimensions – but the concept used to be defined more narrowly as the ‘conservation of natural resources’ and the ‘restoration of ecological balance’ (Meadows et al. 1972). While the ‘Brundtland Report’ was instrumental in broadening the definition and bridging the environmental and economic dimensions (WCED 1987), it was Elkington who stressed the social dimension in the ‘triple bottom line’ of ‘people, planet, profit’ (1998). However, the role of community participation as an elementary part of social sustainability was only established after the turn of the millennium by Giddings et al. (2002). They emphasised the participation aspect of procedural equity “so that people are able to shape their own futures” (ibid., p.194). Dempsey et al. (2011) drew upon this contribution when they considered urban sustainability from a community approach and concluded that communities thrive upon social interaction between community members, organisational initiative through collective groups and networks, the relative stability of a neighbourhood in terms of net migration and turnover, a positive identification or sense of place and the level of trust that follows from a perception of safety. These factors are summarised by Dixon and Woodcraft (2013, p.475) as “the extent to which a neighbourhood supports individual and collective well-being (…) It combines design of the physical environment with a focus on how the people who live in and use a space relate to each other and function as a community”. While most community participation researchers look into social sustainability on the neighbourhood level, Putnam’s book ‘Bowling alone’ (2000) described how a lack of social capital, here understood as strong civic participation and localised empowerment, could prevent collective action and undermine democracy on the macro-level. 

Created on 21-07-2021

Author: T.Croon (ESR11), J.Hoekstra (Supervisor)

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Area: Policy and financing

One general way of defining transdisciplinarity could be as interactions between scientists of different disciplines and representatives of different stakeholder groups in order to interlink context specific, but different, insights, interests and values (Agramont et al, 2019). While there are many other definitions available, the key problem lies in evaluating the result of a transdisciplinary study, mainly because it is a newly emerged discipline and there are no universally recognised criteria for evaluation. Carew and Wickson (2010) present a tool called “Transdisciplinary Wheel” (TDW) to assist researchers engaged in so-called 'messy-problems' such as homelessness, using a transdisciplinary approach. The wheel suggests interrelation between the context, process and product of the research and provides a flexible support to visualise the research process. According to a report (The group of specialists, 2008) published by the Council of Europe, vulnerable groups cannot be defined without specific contextual and historical elements, they do however include immigrants, unemployed, victims of wars and disasters, frail and elderly etc., and for them, homelessness presents one of the major housing problems. In cases where certain vulnerable groups have lacked the capacity to organise themselves in seeking their rights or improving their position, the importance of civil society organisations has been significant. When public institutions could not have addressed problems and meet certain needs for vulnerable groups, the service is usually catered by different stakeholders, among them advocacy civil society organisations (Bežovan et al., 2016), and they could bring great value for the transdisciplinary research approach. One real-life example is the project currently being conducted in Los Angeles, USA, where a transdisciplinary approach is implemented to find faster and easier solutions for homeless people and integrate them across the system (Lipinski, 2020). Homeless people in Los Angeles, along with the lack of shelter and a safe place to conduct basic human activities, face racial inequality. Stakeholders such as community-based organisations, policy experts, psychiatrists, biobehavioral scientists and academia, together with ad-hoc groups of people experiencing homelesness, apply computer and social work science to implement artificial intelligence and machine learning to find ways that may help homeless people.  This example explains the definition of a transdisciplinary approach by showing the collaboration of different academic and non-academic experts that innovatively employed their expertise from computer and social science for the benefit of social service in real life application.    

Created on 08-09-2021

Author: M.Horvat (ESR6)

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