Evaluation and learning in public housing urban renewal

This report analyses how evaluation and learning from public housing renewal is informing policy development and delivery to maximise financial returns and socio-economic outcomes. The research was conducted pre-COVID-19. • Public housing renewal provides an opportunity for policy makers to give direction to urban reconfiguration processes. Since the 2000s public housing renewal has increasingly become part of a policy discourse that places emphasis on 'unlocking' under-utilised sites (i.e. public housing estates) for jobs, investment and urban renewal. In this intersection with urban renewal processes, mixed-tenure public housing renewal, in practice, becomes public housing urban renewal. • This research highlights a consistency of views across stakeholders (often on pragmatic grounds) regarding 'how public housing renewal works'. It is thus possible to conceptualise learning and evaluation in public housing renewal policy-making within an advocacy coalition framework (ACF). • An ACF framework focuses on the alignment of the beliefs, actions and interest of a range of stakeholders with respect to how policies work, or can work. Our use of the ACF is grounded in a consistency of views about 'how public housing renewal works', given the prevailing institutional and financial constraints, and the implication of this for the role of evaluation and learning, rather than any suggestion of a formal or informal actual coalition, or collusion, in agenda setting or public policy objectives. • Interviewees perceived evaluation to be one of several integral parts to the policy formation process. However, evaluations have frequently been summative, rather than formative in nature. In addition, stakeholders also relied on personal and institutional experience to inform policy development and decision-making. These learning dynamics have, over time, reinforced key aspects of the policy core belief within the advocacy coalition. • The policy core belief guiding public housing urban renewal is characterised by a shared belief in the instrumental role of land values and land value change as a means of reconciling multiple asset- and people-based outcomes, while controlling the cost of public policy to public budgets. Mixed tenure, housing density and the strategic leveraging of land are policies that also extract land value for public housing reinvestment and other public policy goals. • The central role of land and land value has raised concerns amongst tenants, groups external to the advocacy coalition, but also some of the interviewees that public housing renewal is increasingly driven by asset-based viability considerations and reduced government exposure to risk. While risk related to physical reconfiguration (public housing stock renewal) in this respect is reduced, other objectives (such as wider social and economic benefits for tenants) increasingly become shaped by - rather than shaping urban reconfiguration processes. • Core members of the public housing renewal advocacy coalition are state governments and private developers. Additional members are (in some cases) community housing providers (CHPs) and local governments.