Assessing the value of the housing schemes through the sustainable return of investments : a path towards sustainability-led evaluations?

Dean, K; Trillo, C; Bichard, E

Abstract

The New 2016 UN Urban Agenda clearly reaffirms the concept that sustainable cities require intertwined environmental and social sustainability. The United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 11 - Make cities inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable - sets as primary target the provision of sufficient affordable housing. Despite the central role played by housing in ensuring sustainability and the importance of both environmental and social pillars in ensuring sustainable development, still current evaluative methods that support decision making on social housing interventions fail in capturing all the socio-environmental spillovers. The paper addresses this issue by demonstrating how Sustainable Return Of Investment allows successfully capturing a range of externalities, related to the broader concept of sustainability also in social housing regeneration schemes. To achieve this goal, a single case study strategy has been chosen. Two extant projects - a high rise housing scheme and an environmental-led program developed by the City West Housing Trust - a nonprofit housing association based in the Manchester area - have been assessed in order to monetise their externalities through different methods. Findings show that the environmental and social spillovers are largely disregarded because of a gap in the evaluation methods and that room for significant improvements exists.

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Nov 29, 2017
• Online Publication Date: Dec 19, 2017
• Publication Date: Dec 19, 2017
• Deposit Date: Oct 26, 2017
• Publicly Available Date: Dec 20, 2017
• Journal: Sustainability
• Electronic ISSN: 2071-1050
• Publisher: MDPI
• Volume: 9
• Issue: 12
• Pages: 2264
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.3390/su9122264
• Publisher URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/su9122264
• Related Public URLs: http://www.mdpi.com/journal/sustainability