Abstract
There has been a long-standing debate about whether urban living is more or less sustainable than suburban living, and quality of life (QoL) is one of several key measures of the social sustainability of residential living. However, to our knowledge, no study to date has examined life satisfaction among residents of downtown high-rise living compared to residents living in suburban low-rise housing. Further, very few studies have utilized building or neighborhood-scale data sets to evaluate residents’ life satisfaction, and even fewer have controlled for both individual and household-level variables such as gender, age, household size, annual income, and length of residence, to evaluate residents’ life satisfaction across different living scenarios. Therefore, the goal of this study was to investigate residents’ satisfaction with their place of residence as well as overall life in general via surveys of individuals living in existing high-rise residential buildings in downtown Chicago, IL, and in existing low-rise residential buildings in suburban Oak Park, IL. Over 1500 individuals were contacted directly, resulting in over 500 responses. The number of fully completed responses for this study was 177, including 94 from residents of four downtown high-rise buildings and 83 from residents in suburban low-rise homes. Residents living in downtown high-rise buildings had significantly higher life satisfaction scores than residents living in suburban low-rise homes when controlling for demographic differences; however, the differences were small, as housing type explained less than 5% of the observed variance in life satisfaction outcomes. The research also evaluated five life satisfaction domains including travel, accessibility, social interaction, safety, and overall residential environment (ORE). In all cases, residents of the downtown high-rises reported higher satisfaction levels, although the scores on all these five satisfaction domains reported from both urban scenarios were very high. Moreover, all five satisfaction domains were highly associated with each other, and accessibility and safety were found as the strongest predictors of ORE for individuals.
Highlights
According to the United Nations, 187,000 people are urbanizing across the world every day [1]
The majority of participants in the downtown high-rise settings were over 50 years old, comprising 70.2%, versus only 31.3% in the suburban low-rise scenario; and 60.2% of the participants in the suburban low-rise setting were in the 36–50 age range, versus 17.1% in the downtown high-rise scenarios
This study found that those living in downtown high-rises were associated with higher life satisfaction than those from suburban low-rises when controlling for demographic differences; this explained less than 5% of the observed variance in life satisfaction outcomes
Summary
According to the United Nations, 187,000 people are urbanizing across the world every day [1]. The world will need to build a new or expanded city of more than one million people every week for the 40 years to cope with this urban growth. From a social perspective, there has been a long-standing argument that people living in dense urban cities may have a lower quality of life (QoL) and are less happy or less satisfied with their lives than those living in the suburbs, based on city and regional data sets [11,12,13,14,15,16,17]. In the social science and urban/community planning fields, life satisfaction and happiness are often used as indicators of subjective QoL [18,19,20]. Residential satisfaction is thought to include a range of domains, such as physical qualities of the dwelling as well as features of the surrounding neighborhood, social environment, and place attachment [27,28]
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