Abstract
The mismatch between the supply and demand of rental apartments in Switzerland represents an obstacle to the transition towards a more sustainable society. The difficulty for the housing providers to accommodate the fast societal change of the demand brings about an increase in vacancies and, to minimize investment risks, a resistance to innovation in the building sector. In this context, understanding the determinants of tenants’ residential mobility and location choice becomes key to designing and promoting sustainable housing. In this paper we present a new interdisciplinary framework for the decision-making process of tenants. To do so, we elucidate the main parameters of the decisions to move and where to move, based on literature review and a group discussion in the Swiss canton of Vaud with the tenants of the two housing providers SCHL and Swiss Mobiliar. We find that the desired housing function determines the tenants’ housing selection. We observe that this desired function changes according to the type of trigger that pushes tenants to move. Additionally, we elicit the potential sustainability implications of the housing functions in the Swiss context. We conclude that the framework can serve as a starting point for rethinking sustainable interventions in the housing sector.
Highlights
Considering that nearly a third of the global final energy use and CO2 emissions comes from buildings, and that 75% of these are residential [1], the transition towards sustainable housing is crucial
The framework Nested in the system of interactions between the social structure, with its rules and resources, and the natural and technical environment, the housing system is defined by supply and demand constraints [9]
In this paper we proposed an interdisciplinary framework representing the elements playing a role in the decision-making process of tenants, with the goal to increase the knowledge on the housing system and support the transition towards housing sustainability
Summary
Considering that nearly a third of the global final energy use and CO2 emissions comes from buildings, and that 75% of these are residential [1], the transition towards sustainable housing is crucial. Despite the many attempts to conceptualize it, housing ‘sustainability’ remains an ambiguous notion that is rarely regarded ‒ as proposed by the 2015 UN Geneva Charter on Sustainable Housing [3] ‒ in its environmental, economic, social and cultural components. Each of these components is often weighted very differently [4] by each of the actors in the housing value chain, whose requirements and expectations do not always coincide [5]. This mismatch manifests itself in the rental housing market, where discrepancies occur between the needs and strategies of the housing providers (e.g., apartments layout, location, features) and the ones of the increasingly fast changing demand (e.g., ageing population, high divorce rate, trend towards single living)
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