scholarly journals Protocol for the Energy Behaviour Assessment of Social Housing Stock: The Case of Southern Europe

2016 ◽  
Vol 96 ◽  
pp. 907-915 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rocío Escandón ◽  
Rafael Suárez ◽  
Juan José Sendra
2021 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 34-46
Author(s):  
John Braithwaite

A disappointment of responses to the Covid-19 crisis is that governments have not invested massively in public housing. Global crises are opportunities for macro resets of policy settings that might deliver lower crime and better justice. Justice Reinvestment is important, but far from enough, as investment beyond the levels of capital sunk into criminal justice is required to establish a just society. Neoliberal policies have produced steep declines in public and social housing stock. This matters because many rehabilitation programmes only work when clients have secure housing. Getting housing policies right is also fundamental because we know the combined effect on crime of being truly disadvantaged, and living in a deeply disadvantaged neighbourhood, is not additive, but multiplicative. A Treaty with First Nations Australians is unlikely to return the stolen land on which white mansions stand. Are there other options for Treaty negotiations? Excellence and generosity in social housing policies might open some paths to partial healing for genocide and ecocide.


Urban Studies ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 004209802110470
Author(s):  
Meng Le Zhang ◽  
George Galster ◽  
David Manley ◽  
Gwilym Pryce

Regeneration is an internationally popular policy for improving distressed neighbourhoods dominated by large social housing developments. Stimulating employment is often touted as a secondary benefit, but this claim has rarely been evaluated convincingly. In 2003, Glasgow City Council transferred ownership of its entire social housing stock to the Glasgow Housing Association and over £4 billion was invested in physical repairs, social services and other regeneration activities. Using a linked census database of individuals (Scottish Longitudinal Study), we evaluate the causal effect of the Stock Transfer on employment in Glasgow through a quasi-experimental design that exploits idiosyncrasies and changes in Glasgow’s administrative boundaries. We find that the Stock Transfer had a positive effect on employment for Glasgow residents who were not living in transferred social housing stock. We establish that this effect was mainly accomplished through the local employment multiplier effect of capital spending rather than through any other programmatic elements of the Stock Transfer. Exploratory analysis shows heterogeneous effects: individuals who were over 21, female, living with dependent children and with less education were less likely to benefit from the intervention. We did not find significant subgroup effects by neighbourhood deprivation.


2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 82
Author(s):  
B Gimeno ◽  
J. Aranda ◽  
D. Zambrana ◽  
A. Conserva ◽  
P. López ◽  
...  

Resumen En España, donde existen más de 18 millones de hogares según el último censo del Instituto Nacional de Estadística en 2011, alrededor del 8% de la población reside en viviendas de alquiler social. Del parque de viviendas español, más de la mitad de los edificios se construyeron antes de 1980 y alrededor del 35% entre 1981 y 2006, año en que fue implantado el Código Técnico de la Edificación. Asimismo, más del 80% de los certificados energéticos de edificios existentes registrados hasta julio de 2015, obtiene una calificación E o inferior en términos de emisiones de CO2. Para mejorar estos resultados, la Unión Europea tiene como objetivo alcanzar una tasa de rehabilitación de edificios privados del 2,5% anual, mejorando la eficiencia energética y ampliando la vida útil del parque edificatorio. Sin embargo, los CEEE únicamente representan parte de la etapa de uso, dejando atrás otras, como la de producción, cuyo impacto puede representar un cuarto de las emisiones de CO2 del edificio a lo largo de su ciclo de vida. Para desarrollar una rehabilitación óptima, se propone evaluar la sostenibilidad de los proyectos de rehabilitación incluyendo las etapas de producción, construcción, uso y fin de vida y considerando el impacto medioambiental y económico, así como aspectos sociales relativos a las características de la vivienda social. Este artículo analiza los impactos medioambientales de diferentes soluciones de rehabilitación en vivienda social, tomando como caso de estudio un edificio de vivienda social en Zaragoza. El edificio antes de la rehabilitación supone casi 50 kgCO2-eq/m2año, donde el 60% corresponden al consumo eléctrico durante la fase de uso del edificio. En el estudio también se incluye la variable de confort térmico en situaciones de vulnerabilidad energética. Abstract In Spain, where there are more than 18 million households according to the last census of the National Institute of Statistics in 2011, around 8% of the population lives in social rental housing. Of the Spanish housing stock, more than half of the buildings were built before 1980 and around 35% between 1981 and 2006, the year in which the Technical Building Code was implemented. Likewise, more than 80% of the energy certificates of existing buildings registered until July 2015, obtain an E rating or lower in terms of CO2 emissions. To improve these results, the European Union aims to achieve a private buildings rehabilitation rate of 2.5% per year, improving energy efficiency and extending the useful life of the building park. However, CEEEs only represent part of the use stage, leaving behind others, such as production, whose impact can represent a quarter of the building's CO2 emissions throughout its life cycle. To develop an optimal rehabilitation, it is proposed to evaluate the sustainability of the rehabilitation projects including the stages of production, construction, use and end of life and considering the environmental and economic impact, as well as social aspects related to the characteristics of social housing. This article analyzes the environmental impacts of different rehabilitation solutions in social housing, taking as a case study a social housing building in Zaragoza. The building before the rehabilitation supposes almost 50 kgCO2-eq / m2año, where 60% correspond to the electrical consumption during the phase of use of the building. The study also includes the thermal comfort variable in situations of energy vulnerability.


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (22) ◽  
pp. 6225 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesica Fernández-Agüera ◽  
Samuel Dominguez-Amarillo ◽  
Marco Fornaciari ◽  
Fabio Orlandi

In southern Europe, the present stock of social housing is ventilated naturally, with practice varying in the different seasons of the year. In winter, windows are kept closed most of the day with the exception of short periods for ventilation, whereas the rest of the year the windows are almost permanently open. In cold weather, air changes depend primarily on the air infiltrating across the envelope and when the temperature is warm, on the air flowing in through open windows. CO2, PM2.5, and TVOC concentration patterns were gathered over a year’s time in three social housing developments in southern Europe with different airtightness conditions and analyzed to determine possible relationships between environmental parameters and occupants’ use profiles. Correlations were found between TVOC and CO2 concentrations, for human activity was identified as the primary source of indoor contaminants: peak TVOC concentrations were related to specific household activities such as cooking or leisure. Indoor and outdoor PM2.5 concentrations were likewise observed to be correlated, although not linearly due to the presence of indoor sources. Ventilation as presently practiced in winter appears to be insufficient to dilute indoor contaminants in all three buildings, nor does summertime behavior guarantee air quality.


2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (12) ◽  
pp. 4448 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samuel Domínguez-Amarillo ◽  
Jesica Fernández-Agüera ◽  
Juan Sendra ◽  
Susan Roaf

Although energy analysis techniques can contribute to substantial energy savings in housing stock retrofitting operations, the outcomes often deviate significantly from the predicted results, which tend to overestimate potential savings by overestimating the starting energy baselines, particularly in southern Europe. This deviation can be largely attributed to occupant practice relating to the use of air conditioning facilities and the temperatures at which occupants feel comfortable. The patterns observed differed widely from standard values. In this study environmental variables, primarily indoor air temperature both with and without HVAC, were monitored in occupied dwellings for a full year. The data gathered were supplemented with surveys on occupants’ temperature-related behaviour to define comfort patterns. The findings show that the standards in place are not consistent with actual comfort-accepted patterns in medium- to low-income housing in southern Spain, where energy consumption was observed to be lower than expected, mostly because occupants endure unsuitable, even unhealthy, conditions over long periods of time. A new user profile, better adjusted to practice in southern Europe, particularly in social housing, is proposed to reflect the current situation.


2020 ◽  
Vol 52 (8) ◽  
pp. 1622-1642 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cody Hochstenbach ◽  
Richard Ronald

Over the last decade, private rental sectors have been in rapid ascendance across developed societies, especially in economically liberal, English-speaking contexts. The Netherlands, and Amsterdam in particular, has also more recently experienced the reversal of a century-long decline in private renting. More unusually, the expansion of private renting in Amsterdam has been explicitly promoted by the municipal and national government, and in cooperation with social housing providers, in response to decreasing accessibility to, and affordability of, social rental and owner-occupied housing. This paper explores how and why this state-initiated revival has come about, highlighting how new growth in rent-liberalized private renting is a partial outcome of the restructuring of the urban housing market around owner occupation since the 1990s. More critically, our analysis asserts that restructuring of Amsterdam’s housing stock can be conceptualized as regulated marketization. Market forces are not being simply unleashed, but given more leeway in some regards and matched by new regulations. We also demonstrate various tensions present in this process of regulated marketization; between national and local politics, between existing housing and new construction, and between policies implemented in different time periods.


2020 ◽  
Vol 38 (3) ◽  
pp. 508-522
Author(s):  
Justine Cooper ◽  
Angela Lee ◽  
Keith Jones

PurposeThis paper aims to identify key performance indicators (KPIs), and their corresponding attributes, required to successfully manage asset management sustainably in a built environment context. Improving the sustainability of existing housing stock is a major challenge facing the UK social housing sector. There is a lack of support to navigate the growing and often incongruent information relating to sustainable development and how to operationalise it. The problem is twofold; first, the current (single criterion) condition-based approach to maintenance planning constrains asset managers and does not fully address the social, environmental and economic aspects of sustainability. Second, the toolkits available for assessing the sustainability of housing are often generic and are time consuming and expensive to implement.Design/methodology/approachThis paper reports the findings of a participatory research project with a leading London-based housing association, using a series of landlord and tenant workshops to derive a set of attributes associated with KPIs to fully reflect the local requirements of the landlord and their interpretation of the sustainability agenda. Five KPIs are considered to be measurable, directly affected by maintenance work and independent of each other were identified by this landlord (comfort, running costs, adaptability, maintenance costs and community).FindingsThe resulting outputs, in a policy context, will provide a clear route map to social housing landlords of how to improve the sustainability of their housing stock with the additional benefits of addressing fuel poverty and carbon emission targets, whilst at the same time, help create and maintain housing in which people want to live.Originality/valueThe proposed approach is flexible enough to incorporate the individual requirements of landlords and be able to adapt to changes in government policy (local and central) in a timely, robust, transparent and inclusive format.


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