Real estate capital is in constant competition with other capital assets due to its different and complementary economic functions such as direct use, productive investment, and speculative investment. These features and the resulting opportunities cannot be easily deduced from direct observation of the real estate markets, so some further insights need to be carried out in order to highlight the relationship between prices, rents and performances. This study aims at providing a multifaceted perspective of a specific urban real estate market to overcome the difficulties arising from opacities and informative asymmetries that hinder the decision of investors, by facilitating the comparison of different options such as capital value, income and performance. Within the mass appraisal approach, the study proposes a methodology for the analysis of the cap rate, intended as the expression of profitability and liquidity of the urban real estate capital asset. The methodology is based on a detailed survey of a sample of the housing market data, collected within a structured database, supported by statistical and territorial analyses of the sample, in order to display the range of cap rates featuring each sub-market, and the related distributions. The methodology is applied to a case study of nearly 1000 properties distributed in a vast urban area of the municipality of Palermo, Italy. The consistency of the relationships between the three variables has been tested with reference to two hypotheses about the sub-market definition, which has been carried out by cluster and by neighbourhood.

Energy communities using renewable energy sources directly contributes to reduction of climate change gas emissions and energy consumption in the European Union. In addition, energy communities enable citizens to transform from (passive) consumers to prosumers (active consumers and producers) and to play a proactive role in the deployment of energy transition in urban areas. As the transposition of European rules about energy communities into the national laws of EU Member States is very articulated and differentiated, this study proposes a framework to analyze and compare regulatory and financial instruments. This framework is applied to the analysis of the cases of Italy and Spain as representative of European states in which collective actions in the energy sector are not very common, with the aim of highlighting the main critical issues affecting the effectiveness of energy transition strategies and assessing the economic feasibility of energy communities. Based on analysis of regulations and procedures, including at the local level, it appears that municipalities play an important role as promoters of initiatives among citizen communities, while complex bureaucratic procedure is the most critical issue in both countries and can significantly hinder the spread of energy communities. With respect to the different financial incentives available for the formation of energy communities in Italy and Spain, a few cases studies are hypothesized, calculating the most relevant cost-effectiveness indicators, e.g., Net Present Value. It turns out that a project with the same characteristics achieves greater economic feasibility in Italy than in Spain, depending on the type and size of incentives set by national laws and, above all, that financial incentives are necessary to make the formation of energy communities cost-effective and thus to achieve direct citizen involvement in energy transition actions.

Housing affordability problems have become more serious over the course of the last few decades and are now also affecting the middle-class, despite the fall in prices on the housing market. This study proposes a methodology to assess threshold-income as an index for measuring housing affordability by applying a combination of the ratio income and residual income approaches. The methodology is applied to two particular areas of Sicily in Italy as case studies consisting of medium-size metropolitan areas located in a less developed European region. The areas have been chosen on the basis of their different territorial structure: a polarized area that comprises a high-density city centre and a polynuclear urban region. The results are diversified for income level, as well as for town and urban zone, and allow us to compare the housing affordability problems between towns belonging to the same metropolitan area.

Public housing policy has been proposing plans of public housing (PH) stock alienation or, as an alternative, property enhancement plans, since administrative and financial commitments have become too heavy for municipalities. This paper deals with one of the current public housing management policy initiatives, undertaken by the Municipality of Palermo (Italy), which aimed at transferring a significant part of the public housing asset to the current tenants, according to some terms and conditions, and applying a politically fixed price. This policy is described in general, focusing on the amount of the assets involved, reporting the terms and conditions for transferring them at an affordable price, and analysing their concentration/distribution in the urban areas. The main aim of the paper is to provide a valuation pattern for defining the trade-off between the efficiency and fairness of such a tool, recognising the conditions for the consistency between the transfer price established by municipality, the merit of the public housing asset, and the market value. A detailed study on two representative neighbourhoods was carried out in order to measure the value of solidarity of this policy and to propose some corrective rules.

Green infrastructure in urban environments provides a wide range of ecological, social, aesthetic, and health co-benefits. Urban plant covers in particular contribute to improved outdoor environmental conditions that, in turn, influence the energy behavior of buildings and their indoor thermo-hygrometric comfort performance. Within this context, this study illustrates a methodology aimed at verifying the economic feasibility of alternative types of green areas for public and private stakeholders, which are analyzed as passive energy measures. Therefore, our methodology integrates approaches from different disciplines and consists of a microclimatic analysis of different vegetation scenarios and of the outdoor comfort level, an evaluation of the energy needs of a sample of houses, and an economic feasibility estimation considering different scenarios and public and private investors. The methodology is illustrated through its application to a suburban district of the Sicilian city of Trapani in the South of Italy, considered representative of Mediterranean climate conditions. Results showed significant differences between the scenario outcomes depending on the type of vegetation used in the green areas and put in evidence how economic feasibility for some stakeholders may be achieved in the management phase if adequate incentives equal to the planting cost are assumed.