Journal of Housing and the Built Environment最新文献

Although well-designed urban streets are beneficial for sustainability and livability, few studies have considered their role in housing price estimates. To fill this gap, this study conducted in Nanjing, China, aims to examine the contribution of streetscape features to housing prices. Data were collected for 2040 residential blocks within the four municipal districts in July 2021. A semantic segmentation approach was used to identify the percentage of elements in the images from Baidu Street View. Two types of streetscape related variables (Enclosure and Greenery) were calculated and added to a hedonic pricing model based on Geographically Weighted Regression. The results show that the streetscape factors all have positive effects on house prices, and the contribution to house prices from large to small is grass, plants, horizontal buildings, vertical buildings and trees. By comparing the parameters of the models, it can be concluded that the inclusion of streetscape features and consideration of spatial heterogeneity can significantly improve the accuracy of housing price estimation. The findings of the current study contribute to decision-making in housing planning and urban design and to judgments about pricing reasonableness.

This study examines the influence of heterogeneous expectations between buyers and sellers on housing market cycles. We propose an agent-based model that integrates houses into a Sugarscape model for analyzing housing market dynamics. Our model incorporates spatial factors into pricing by requiring agents to evaluate a property’s value based on its location. Agents have limited information because they base their decision-making on spatial information. We investigate the impact of agents’ visual range and the heterogeneity of their expectations regarding housing prices. Our simulations with different vision levels show that as agents expand their field of vision, the housing market experiences heightened buying competition, thereby increasing both average housing prices and market volatility. Simulation results with different heterogeneity levels show that when people have more homogeneous expectations, the housing market becomes more volatile. As heterogeneity decreases, the volatility of house prices increases more rapidly, implying that agents’ homogeneous expectations reinforce feedback in the system, leading to higher volatility and more complex dynamics.

The residualization of public rented housing is a prevalent phenomenon throughout Europe, and strongly present in the small and strongly means-tested social housing sector in Norway. In this article, we discuss the contested geographical dimension of residualization. Scientific studies of the geographical and locational aspects of social housing are scare in Norway and modest internationally. Based on qualitative interviews with representatives of social housing administrators in the fifteen largest urban municipalities in Norway, this paper contributes to the literature by exploring how these social housing bureaucrats perceive, reflect on, and respond to, questions related to the spatial localization of residual social housing. Does it matter where social housing is located? What are the consequences of the geography of social housing for tenants, their neighbours, and the wider socio-spatial development of cities? These are questions pondered in the interviews. In our qualitative analysis, we identify three broad themes. First, the theme of the internal social milieu – inclusive communities versus neighbour complaints and conflicts in the public housing projects. Second, the theme of neighbourhood effects; how concentrated poverty is influencing the local community in general and the upbringing of children in particular. Third, the theme of response from external neighbours and communities, in the form of either predominantly exclusive strategies (NIMBYism – Not in My Backyard), but also less prevalent inclusive strategies like (PHIMBYism – Public Housing In My Backyard).

In many countries, rental housing is associated with insecure occupant rights and limited control for residents and homeownership is linked with ontological security. In the literature on homemaking, ontological security comprises a set of attributes, i.e., secure occupancy, autonomy and control, but these are often bundled, or treated jointly. In this paper we draw on the lived experiences of residents in Rental Housing Cooperatives (RHC) in Honduras and Australia, and ask how the experience of ontological security in RHC is shaped by its distinct characteristics? We argue that, if the experience of ontological security can be ‘unbundled’, wellbeing in rental housing, particularly for population groups increasingly locked out of homeownerships, can be advanced through housing policy innovation that enhances these, or specific, attributes of ontological security. Methodologically the paper draws on relational thinking, interview data (n = 15) and qualitative analysis of homemaking practices within RHC in Honduras and Australia. The paper utilises a four-quadrant qualitative assessment framework for evaluating occupants’ sense of security and autonomy/control, relative to their sense of home and simply being housed. Our results suggest that secure occupancy more fundamentally underpins a sense of home, than autonomy/control. Implications for rental policy and research are considered.

After its expansionist phase in the XX Century, in most countries public housing has incurred in a state of long-term crisis that still lasts until today. With long-lasting disinvestment in the Italian public housing, many dwellings and buildings are vacant or in decay. Public housing companies yet rely heavily on dismissal and sales to cover high overheads and low rents. In this context, there has been sporadic experimentation of partnerships between public authorities and cooperative actors in enacting hybrid forms of management as an alternative to the sale of public assets. The article uses the case study of the Quattro Corti project in Milan and experts’ panels in four Italian cities to explore potential innovation pathways for public housing in different contexts and to identify opportunities and challenges of the involvement of cooperatives through partnerships for hybrid management. A main question is whether such partnerships may be trojan horses for profit-actors or vehicles of housing commons. The article contributes to the emerging literature on the role of cooperative actors in public and social housing policies.

In recent years, gated communities have increasingly become an attractive lifestyle residence worldwide and in the Middle fostering security, privacy, seclusion, and exclusivity. Nonetheless, it seems that with these benefits, other impacts had unfolded and exposed the urban fabric to new attributes such as segregation, fragmentation, and social exclusion. However, gaps exist in the literature on comparative studies on gated communities in regions such as GCC (Gulf Corporation Council) countries and the Middle East (Glasze & Alkhayyal, 2002). This paper aims to examine the social impact of gated communities on the surrounding neighbourhoods through a comparative analysis of cases from the Middle East and GCC. The methodology was implemented to develop a qualitative framework of social segregation indicators to examine similarities and differences between the cases, aiming to identify patterns and gain insights to answer the article’s question of whether this phenomenon can be contagious in different settings. Findings reveal that gated communities can have negative and positive impacts on the social well-being of the surrounding neighbourhoods and may lead to social segregation and exclusion in different geographical settings despite their emergence motives. The paper concludes that isolation and lack of interaction between residents inside and outside the walls may have impacts on the social aspect of the surroundings.

It is recognised that migrants’ access to housing in destination cities is shaped by a number of factors. This paper takes as its focus the processes of housing allocation for low-income West African migrants in the Bronx, New York City. Drawing on 37 semi-structured interviews with housing providers and intermediary organisations that perform housing-related functions, the paper builds upon literature on migration industries and informal housing solutions among migrant communities, and reveals the formal and informal systems which migrants must navigate in order to secure housing. The specific roles which housing providers and intermediary organisations – including housing advocacies NGOs, public institutions, and religious groups – play are highlighted. The paper shows that informal processes operating in the low-income housing market in the Bronx mirror the operations of formal institutional structures, but instead of financial and legal grounds for housing allocation, informal migration industries are centred on social ties within the established migrant community. Such arrangements provide much-needed access to affordable housing for low-income tenants and facilitate further migration.