Conceptualizing And Researching The Social And Economic Benefits Of The Social And Functional Mixes In French Large Scale Sustainable Neighborhoods

Developed urban real estate markets are today confronted with a socio-environmental contradiction: increasingly unaffordable housings,especially for the poorest,and green building practices that tend to exclude them.Thus,there is a pressing need to explore alternatives that allow to mutually deal with housing inequalities and climate change.Sustainable mixed-income and mixed-use neighbourhoods have been developing for years in France,but research has lagged behind industry practices,with few or no articles as revealed in the literature review.The research gap is clear.The purpose of this study,on the basis of open expert interviews with real estate developers and public planners completed with quantitative data,is threefold.First,to investigate how the real estate developer manages to find economic equilibrium while meeting the environmental,social,and functional programmatic requirements of the public planner.Second,to qualify and quantify how the low-income people benefit from this new stock of social housing.Third,to identify the success factors for mixed-income and mixed-use sustainable neighborhoods.A significant financial contribution from the wealthiest benefit the low-income people in sustainable neighborhoods with social and functional mixes.The high construction costs to meet comfort and environmental requirements leave little leeway for profitability through the sale of social housing,which is usually counterbalanced by a high margin on open market housing.Similarly,it appeared that a significant proportion of the additional investment costs of the energy-efficient central systems were borne by the office building,which resulted in a significant reduction in housing costs.As for implementing other innovative solutions such as parking mutualization,brought together under the “solidarity of use”,a wholly new approach is to be adopted by the project stakeholders.The low-income households not only benefit from housing and systems that would have been difficult to build without the home purchasing power of the wealthiest,but also from similar housing quality as justified by the interviewed experts,and with quantitative data on construction costs.The analysis of the construction costs data revealed a homogeneous quality of housing among several buildings constructed by different developers in La Confluence,Lyon,as stated by all the interviewees,which allowed for a triangulation of the data.Finally,the scale of the project,the development of the local housing market and the control of an independent public planning corporation were identified as success factors of these quantitative and qualitative mechanisms.The research findings seek to inform decision-makers on the solutions for efficient implementation of social and functional mixes within a sustainable neighborhood.Future studies could further quantify the economic balance achieved by developers,analyze the societal impact of these developments,or extend this research to other countries.