Sustainable development scale of housing estates: An economic assessment using machine learning approach

Economic sustainability is often addressed from the perspective of economic growth and at the national level. In contrast, this research attempts to examine the question of economic sustainability of human settlement at a local project level. Urban planners need to strike a balance between dispersal...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Sustainable development (Bradford, West Yorkshire, England) West Yorkshire, England), 2021-07, Vol.29 (4), p.708-718
Main Authors: Tang, Bo‐sin, Ho, Winky K.O., Wong, Siu Wai
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Amenities
Cognitive style
Condominium plan
Condominiums
density
Dispersal
Economic development
Economic growth
Economics
Estates
Households
Housing
Housing developments
Housing estates
Human settlement
Human settlements
Learning algorithms
Machine learning
Neighborhoods
Population density
Population policy
Sustainability
Sustainable development
threshold
Urban planning
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Summary:Economic sustainability is often addressed from the perspective of economic growth and at the national level. In contrast, this research attempts to examine the question of economic sustainability of human settlement at a local project level. Urban planners need to strike a balance between dispersal and over‐concentration of population in cities. The existing theories suggest that either excessively low or extremely high levels of household concentration is undesirable to a neighborhood. In this study, an economic assessment using machine learning (ML) techniques is used to identify the threshold scale of a housing estate, which comprises many privately owned residential units (like condos) with shared amenities. Using two decades of property transaction data in Hong Kong as our evidence, this study has found that a tipping point exists in the development scale of these housing estates. Housing values initially rise with the number of residential units in a housing estate but gradually fall when it increases beyond a critical limit. This nonlinear economic relationship is attributed to the per household share of common facilities, which does not increase sufficiently to match with the growing population density of the housing estates. The policy implication is that, to optimize housing supply, urban planning should not just focus on increasing the development bulk of housing but should also pay attention to the possible bottlenecks in the provision of shared amenities in the neighborhood.
ISSN:0968-0802
1099-1719
DOI:10.1002/sd.2168