Housing developers’ perceived barriers to implementing municipal sustainability requirements in Swedish sustainability-profiled districts

Abstract

Swedish municipalities are taking an active role in shaping and implementing sustainability-related policies in urban development by initiating and governing sustainability-profiled district developments on municipally owned land. To drive sustainable development and innovation in these districts and develop future policies, municipalities use land allocation agreements to set project-specific sustainability requirements on housing development projects that go beyond the current national building regulations. Developers play a key role in implementing these municipal sustainability requirements. The purpose of this paper is to explore housing developers’ perceived barriers to implementing municipal sustainability requirements in their projects, which ultimately constrain possibilities for municipalities to drive sustainable development. Findings are based on case studies of two sustainability-profiled district developments in different Swedish municipalities. Main barriers perceived by the developers could be categorized into: (1) increased costs when adapting to unforeseen changes that constrain project budgets and (2) conflicting interests and objectives between interdependent actors. These barriers are contextualised within the relationship between the developers and municipalities. Contributions are made to literature on developers’ roles and perspectives in sustainability-oriented urban development. We illustrate how conflicting short-term and long-term interests between developers and municipalities complicate and impede problem solving in housing development projects. This calls for more research on these actors’ interests, and how they align and conflict in these types of projects. Findings also illustrate how developers resolve issues through interactions with municipalities, indicating collaborative problem solving processes to investigate further.

Management of Municipal Housing Resources By Local Authorities in the Municipalities of Krakow (Poland) and Oradea (Romania) – A Comparative Study

“…The paper (Vandeventer et al, 2023) offers a critical perspective on place management, developing an ecological approach. According to (Candel & Törnå, 2022), Swedish municipalities are taking an active role in shaping and implementing sustainability-related policies in urban development by initiating and governing sustainability-profiled district developments on municipally owned land. In (van der Heijden, 2002), analyzing the policy context as well as the size and the character of the social rented sector in six Western European countries, three plausible scenarios were presented.…”

Using Sustainability-Oriented Developer Obligations and Public Land Development to Create Public Value

“…After a developer wins and signs a land allocation agreement with the municipality, these project-specific sustainability requirements are negotiated until a final development right has been signed, typically alongside detailed planning. During this process, the developers often meet various challenges (see [80]), which result in alterations to the requirements and other land-use regulations through continuous dialogue with the municipality. This process of developing requirements can be interpreted as the municipalities translating public values and framing their desired public value outcomes.…”

“…It is unclear what exactly the municipalities are leveraging in exchange for these sustainability-oriented developer obligations, which allocate the responsibility of realizing various public sustainability objectives to the housing developers. For the housing developers, this often entails some form of innovation and fitting the additional work with subsequent costs and added risk into their own project budgets (see [80]). If there are no unearned land and building value increments that are not reflected in the land price, the municipalities might instead be capturing part of the developers' profits.…”