A methodology for ex-post assessment of social impacts of an affordable housing project

Affordable housing projects are becoming increasingly important in China, and they have remarkable social impacts. Yet, there is lack of appropriate methodologies for ex-post assessment of those social impacts. This knowledge gap will be filled in by this paper through proposing a new methodology, containing 24 assessment indicators in 3 categories, i.e. socio- economic effects (SE), mutual adaptabilities (MA) and social risks (SR). Considering inter- relationships among categories and indicators, the Analytic Network Process (ANP) method is adopted to determine the respective weight of each category and indicator, followed by the fuzzy comprehensive evaluation-based assessment model. Then, the proposed methodology is exemplified with an affordable housing project in Nanjing city of Eastern China. The results show that the project has produced quite positive social impacts, and reveal the improvement directions at category level, where SE should be the emphasis and SR has the largest potentiality. At indicator level, reducing crime cases around the studied project, providing better communication and water supply facilities of the studied project and improving the outbound public transport of the studied project are pressing issues. Finally, this paper is concluded with possible future works.