An official website of the United States government
Despite the central role that landlords, or residential rental property owners (RRPOs), play in housing, important areas of RRPO decision making are not well understood. Because of the importance of RRPOs in the housing system, gaps in our knowledge leave planners at a disadvantage when creating policies to improve housing stability for tenants. This article is a comprehensive, interdisciplinary literature review of RRPO characteristics and behavior framed around three decision points: career lifecycle, portfolio maintenance and development, and property operations. This review ends with suggestions for an RRPO-focused research agenda that supports urban resiliency and housing stability for renters.
more »
« less
Decision-Making Approach to Urban Energy Retrofit—A Comprehensive Review
This research presents a comprehensive review of the research on smart urban energy retrofit decision-making. Based on the analysis of 91 journal articles over the past decade, the study identifies and discusses five key categories of approaches to retrofit decision-making, including simulation, optimization, assessment, system integration, and empirical study. While substantial advancements have been made in this field, opportunities for further growth remain. Findings suggest directions for future research and underscore the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration, data-driven evaluation methodologies, stakeholder engagement, system integration, and robust and adaptable retrofit solutions in the field of urban energy retrofitting. This review provides valuable insights for researchers, policymakers, and practitioners interested in advancing the state of the art in this critical area of research to facilitate more effective, sustainable, and efficient solutions for urban energy retrofits.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 2046374
- PAR ID:
- 10417443
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Buildings
- Volume:
- 13
- Issue:
- 6
- ISSN:
- 2075-5309
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1425
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
null (Ed.)In the United States, approximately 40% of the primary energy use and 72% of the electricity use belong to the building sector. This shows the significance of studying the potential for reducing the building energy consumption and buildings’ sustainability for ensuring a sustainable development. Therefore, many different efforts focus on reducing the energy consumption of residential buildings. Data-validated building energy modeling methods are among the studies for such an effort, particularly, by enabling the identification of the potential savings associated with different potential retrofit strategies. However, there are many uncertainties that can impact the accuracy of such energy model results, one of which is the weather input data. In this study, to investigate the impact of spatial temperature variation on building energy consumption, six weather stations in an urban area with various urban density were selected. A validated energy model was developed using energy audit data and high-frequency electricity consumption of a residential building in Austin, TX. The energy consumption of the modeled building was compared using the selected six weather datasets. The results show that energy use of a building in an urban area can be impacted by up to 12% due to differences in urban density. This indicates the importance of weather data in predicting energy consumption of the building. The methodology and results of this study can be used by planners and decision makers to reduce uncertainties in estimating the building energy use in urban scale.more » « less
-
Abstract Rapid urbanization, climate change, and aging infrastructure pose significant challenges to achieving sustainability and resilience goals in urban building energy use. Although retrofitting offers a viable solution to mitigate building energy use, there has been limited analysis of its effects under various weather conditions associated with climate change in urban building energy use simulations. Moreover, certain parameters in energy simulations necessitate extensive auditing or survey work, which is often impractical. This research proposes a framework that integrates various datasets, including building footprints, Lidar data, property appraisals, and street view images, to conduct neighborhood-scale building energy use analysis using the Urban Modeling Interface (UMI), an Urban Building Energy Model (UBEM), in a coastal neighborhood in Galveston, Texas. Seven retrofit plans and three weather conditions are considered in the scenarios of building energy use. The results show that decreasing the U-value of building envelopes helps reduce energy use, while increasing the U-value leads to higher energy consumption in the Galveston neighborhood. This finding provides direction for coastal Texas cities, like Galveston, to update building standards and implement retrofit measures.more » « less
-
Building facades are components that shape a structure’s daylighting, energy use, and view factors. This paper presents an approach that enables designers to understand the impact that different facade designs will have over time and space in the built environment through a BIM-enabled augmented reality system. The system permits the examination of a range of facade retrofit scenarios and visualizes the daylighting simulations and aesthetics of a structure while retaining function and comfort. A focus of our study was to measure how participants make decisions within the multiobjective decision space designers often face when buildings undergo retrofitting. This process often requires designers to search for a set of alternatives that represent the optimal solution. We analyze the decision-making process of forty-four subjects to determine how they explore design choices. Our results indicate the feasibility of using BIM-enabled AR to improve how designers make informed decisions.more » « less
-
Successful urban systems-related climate-action-support tools enable urban stakeholders to communicate and collaborate across and beyond their respective disciplines to identify innovative, transformative solutions to increase urban infrastructure resilience and sustainability. The actions of humans within buildings and the relationship of buildings to their near-building environments (aka microclimate) constitute one understudied urban system with significant impact on urban energy use strongly impacted by a warming urban climate. This interdisciplinary research team lead by an architect at a large research university collaborates with local community partners to identify evidence-based approaches for the integration of human behavior data, building energy use characteristics, future climate scenarios, and near-building microclimate data. The team has built a prototypical model, which integrates urban trees into urban energy models based on a large-scale inventory and probabilistic occupancy data based on a neighborhood wide energy use survey. To ensure that these urban energy models are equitable, however, the needs of marginalized populations must be included- especially those most vulnerable to the consequences of a changing climate. The paper reports on two intertwined research strands. First of all, the team’s best practices for gathering data from individuals facing marginalization as well as the application of this residential occupancy data into neighborhood energy models. The second strand addresses trees in urban landscapes and their capacity to modify temperatures in the near-building environment, which is important for reducing summer heat loads on building surfaces. Preliminary results for an urban neighborhood strategies are reported.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.3390/buildings13061425
