Abstract

In the past 25 years social housing programmes in Chile have taken three basic forms. During the military regime the traditional basic housing and a neighbourhood upgrading programme operated, while in 1990 the new democratic authorities added the progressive housing line of action. As there was scope for improving these programmes, a research project was set up with the aim of first identifying, and then finding, the relative importance of social housing attributes for different types of dwellers. Three surveys were considered in the project: a two-wave Delphi survey to specialists in the field and a focus group survey to current and potential beneficiaries, in order to identify the most relevant housing attributes, and a stated-preference survey to a sample of five types of social housing dwellers. With the latter data discrete choice models were estimated, which allowed the relative weight of (and subjective valuation, or willingness to pay for) each such attribute to be determined. The methodological features of the project are presented and its main results are discussed.