Social housing residents' community participation under the impact of lease period restrictions

Abstract

Community participation is the foundation of a community’s healthy environment and sustainable development. Social housing can provide people without their own homes and underprivileged groups with more secure conditions to live and work and thereby realize housing justice and reduce social vulnerability. In terms of community management, residents’ engagement in community affairs can dramatically reduce the subsequent burden of environmental maintenance and community management, which encourage residents in the community to actively pass on the habit of maintenance and to collectively create resilient and sustainable communities. However, lease term restrictions in Taiwan’s social housing policy stipulates that ordinary tenants can only rent the house for 6 years at a maximum and tenants with special conditions for 12. This study attempts to understand whether lease term restrictions affect residents’ willingness to participate in community affairs. In addition, we also try to find out how to motivate residents to participate in community construction under the existence of lease term restrictions. The scope of this study focuses on citizens who qualified to rent social housing in the Greater Taipei area (including Taipei City and New Taipei). We designed a questionnaire for our target audience, tested its reliability and validity and picked random-selected samples to finish the questionnaire. Analyzing from the perspective of Egoism, we find out that the result of this research shows that residents do not commonly avoid participation in community affairs. Although lease term restrictions do have some effects on residents' willingness to participate, they are still willing to participate since issues of safety and environmental quality have a direct impact on their lives. However, the residents’ chief consideration is how time spent in participation affects one’s time. Also, though substantial returning benefit is not the main consideration when deciding whether to participate, it does effectively boost residents’ willingness. Furthermore, community member relations is found to have a positive correlation with their willingness to participate.