Assessment of Social Indicators in Energy Housing Retrofits: Fid-Bau Portal

Assessment of Social Indicators in Energy Housing Retrofits

Jafari, Amirhosein / Valentin, Vanessa / Bogus, Susan M.

Green housing retrofits for increasing energy efficiency provide a multitude of benefits which include savings for homeowners in energy bills and curbing carbon emissions. The literature about the impact of housing retrofits on the economy and the environment is quite rich; however the measurement of social impacts of housing retrofits is less well developed. Social impacts of housing retrofits can be indicated in different ways, from the improvement of occupants’ health and comfort to providing job opportunities in the community. This study points to the need for considering possible social benefits of housing retrofits in addition to the ecological and economic benefits. However, the typical non-market value of social aspects makes it difficult to quantify the impacts of such aspects in engineering decisions and integrating them with economic and environmental aspects. The objective of this paper is to (1) identify social indicators of green housing retrofits; and (2) introduce an approach for valuing and assessing the identified indicators of a housing retrofit project. In this paper, a framework of social criteria is presented for a housing retrofit project. A prototype survey is presented for identifying and assessing social indicators of housing retrofits and preliminary results of a pilot study are also evaluated. Future directions on the evaluation of social aspects in green housing retrofits are discussed. The results of this study lay out the groundwork for the consideration of social aspects in green house retrofits and can help decision makers to measure the performance and improvements of social criteria in a housing retrofit project.