Factors Affecting the Residents’ Willingness to Participate in Urban Housing Renewal: Theory and Evidence

Currently, there are more than 540,000 houses which are over 30 years old in Taipei, accounting for about 60% of residence in Taipei overall. However, based on the statistics from Taipei City Urban Regeneration Office by December 31, 2015, the number of cases according to Urban Renewal Act delineated renewal area is only 65 under construction and 88 completed. According to an expert, there are more than 100 cases that the urban renewal developers negotiate with residents in Taipei every year in his company, and there are also other companies negotiating with residents. Thus, there might be a thousand cases in Taipei each year. Therefore, this study suggests that urban renewal held by private sector is in slow progress and apparently inefficient. In addition to the duration that the urban renewal business projects are sent to government, the more time-consuming part is the process of negotiations between the developers and the residents. Thus, this study would like to investigate the factors influencing the residents’ intention of urban renewal in the negotiation process between the developers and the residents. Related documents and data show that the key to the success of urban renewal is that whether the residents are able to get larger housing area or higher value of houses. Though things about interest on the specific amount of profit is indeed an indispensable factor of urban renewal, in addition to profit, human interaction and the psychological factors such as the factors of community relations, negotiation time and trust between developers and residents. The factors above are what this study focuses on. The purpose of this study is to establish a set of econometric model and analyze the factors mentioned above. The establishment of this study is composed of document review, expert interview, hypothesis and model establishment, survey creation and empirical analysis. Eventually the research results are compared with original hypotheses, and analyze the importance of the factors that residents participate in the urban renewal. The empirical results show that the level of the concrete planning satisfaction and trust of residents for developers are the two factors that positively affect the intention for residents to participate in the urban renewal, while the negotiation time factor has negative affect, which means that as the negotiation time increased, the residents'' participation intention will be reduced. What’s more, the degree of difficulty of community communication factor does not significantly affect the intention for residents to participate in urban renewal.