Architectural Quality and the Housing Market: Values of the Late Twentieth Century Built Heritage

Alice Barreca

doi:10.3390/su14052565

Abstract

The assessment of the ‘quality’ of built heritage is a complex transdisciplinary issue, which both public administrations and real estate developers need to carefully consider when making any interventions. Recent international climate regulations underline that currently around 75% of buildings in the EU are not energy efficient. In Italy, those inefficient buildings are more than 50 years old and, if subjected to retrofit interventions, risk being totally transformed and losing their historical value in favor of a more contemporary use. This work aimed to study the residential heritage of the second half of the 20th century in the real estate market and to understand if, how, and in what measure the building and architectonical qualities are recognized and monetized by buyers. The city of Turin was chosen as a study area, and residential building qualities were analyzed using two quality indicators to perform a GWR on market POIs. The results highlighted that housing historical qualities are not homogeneously recognized by the real estate market, in favor of green ones. This work can help both public and private bodies to identify which ‘invisible’ quality residential buildings are immediately exploitable for enhancement strategies, with more respectful retrofitting interventions and a modern protection policy.

Highlights

The globalization of the economy and the processes of technological innovation are producing structural transformations of the economic and social system, which are reflected in the paradigms that, for many decades, have been the basis for the development of cities.The profound and remarkable changes at the scale of the macroeconomic system are bringing profound transformations in the construction and real estate market, starting with the hierarchy of values
The real estate market in Italy has been characterized by a phase of continuous decline since 2008; the contraction of employment rate and the changed distribution of income are perceptible in the cities through the abandonment of residential and commercial areas, while, in the inner territories, they are causing the progressive depopulation of villages
The principal results of this work are two: the construction of the two quality indicators of recognised quality and observed quality, and the estimation of the influence of the intrinsic building features on the price formation process of each unit estimated in the sample by the Geographically Weighted Regression (GWR) model application

Summary

Introduction

The globalization of the economy and the processes of technological innovation are producing structural transformations of the economic and social system, which are reflected in the paradigms that, for many decades, have been the basis for the development of cities.The profound and remarkable changes at the scale of the macroeconomic system are bringing profound transformations in the construction and real estate market, starting with the hierarchy of values. The Italian population has been decreasing since 2015, and in 2019, for the first time in the last 90 years, has started a phase of demographic decline [1] In this situation, the approach to the real estate market needs to be rethought, in relation with the reform of several regulatory city plans; given the end of population increase ( theoretical), land consumption must cease, and the use of free land must be totally substituted by the re-use of the existing and abandoned building stock and the empty and underused residential stock. This research focused on the study of the real estate market, to analyze the economic value of housing stock built in the second half of the 20th century (1950–1999). The second aspect that was analyzed in the literature reviews was the use of Geographically

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Conclusion