Social Housing Allocation: A Problem Structuring approach

The demand for social housing (SH) has emerged all over Europe and it is expo-nentially increasing particularly since the 2008 global economic crisis. This growing temporary housing demand comes from a sector of the population living in the so-called “grey zone”, also known as the ‘in-work poverty’ population. The “grey zone” is composed of individuals in a situation of housing vulnerability [39]: people whose housing needs cannot be met by the market and at the same time who are not eligible to access public housing programs, such as the homeless, internal migrants, city users, single-earner families, the elderly, people subject to eviction, single parents. Typically, the process underpinning the selection of SH projects has focused on re-ducing the SH shortage by providing enough supply. Nowadays, the process of selec-tion of SH projects is no longer simply related to the lack of housing stock but also to the social, economic and cultural changes that currently affect a wide segment of the European population [7, 9, 19]. In this new scenario, the focus of SH policies is shift-ing from the building understood as a product to the people who live in the building. In fact where the human factor is fundamental to target the recipients, in order to pursue the integration of different social groups and the improvement the living con-ditions in the buildings. As the attention now being given to the topic in the interna-tional arena testifies, the scientific community and the market are looking to SH as a key area in which to test new approaches to sustainable design and implementation, taking into account not only the three “consolidated” pillars of sustainability (i. e. environment, society and economy), but also relevant additional dimensions, such as ethics, culture and technology [5]. In this scenario, SH represents a challenge that requires to be made with limited investments and at the same time designed to ensure the reduction of housing cost for users, promoters and managers in the use phase, as well as the achievement of the highest quality standards. The housing cost, including both the rental costs and those of utilities should not exceed 40% of the users income [33]. It is a given fact that sustainable design has, above all, the environmental perfor-mance in terms of building envelope as its object and purpose. Usually, alongside this, the use of renewable energy, eco-friendly materials and technological solutions for the quality of life indoors and the optimal management of water and waste are recognized as integrated quality of the intervention. An aspect that nowadays is con-sidered increasingly important is the ability of real estate transactions to generate and preserve value. Moreover, a key objective of SH is the creation of an “active commu-nity” where people can easily integrate into the urban context. Therefore, it is essen-tial to pay particular attention to the location of the project, its accessibility and prox-imity to services, to all the forms of participation and co-planning that the project can stimulate, to the mix of facilities to be offered (in the individual building and in the neighbourhood), promoting reduced economic and social inequalities and avoiding the creation of social segregation [3]. In this sense, along with the architectural design it is therefore essential to simultaneously undertake the “project of social management” of the intervention, which means predicting the set of actors and actions in the use phase that can ensure their sustainability in terms of the community. In the planning phase it a reference profile of the future community that will ensure a balanced social mix should already be established.