The environmental footprint of housing is greatly influenced by the size of a dwelling. Housing size is the result of households’ dwelling selections; accordingly, it is critical to consider residential preferences and choices to inform efforts towards housing sustainability. This study aimed to understand tenants’ preferences for and choices of housing size as one amongst several dwelling characteristics and identify obstacles and opportunities for reducing size in the light of promoting sustainable housing. We employed logistic regression models to analyse a survey with 878 Swiss tenants, and our results identify preference for large dwellings as a major obstacle for reducing dwelling size among affluent tenants. Conversely, tenants with lower income might be forced to move to a smaller dwelling due to financial constraints or attribute higher importance to the financial benefit of lower rents. However, financial disincentives along with substantial non-monetary costs of moving, such as the disruption of local bonds and the difficulty of finding a satisfactory dwelling, can outweigh the benefits of moving to a smaller dwelling. To overcome such obstacles, we suggest offering incentives and other facilitating measures for downsizing moves as well as ensuring an adequate supply of smaller dwellings capable of providing high living quality. We highlight the potential of studying housing functions to conceptualize dwellings fulfilling these requirements.

Worldwide, there is an urgent imperative to provide a housing supply that is environmentally sustainable as well as acceptable and desirable for its users. A holistic and integrative understanding of the relationship between households’ residential preferences and dwellings is needed to achieve this goal. This paper addresses this gap by conceptualizing and operationalizing housing as a system whose human and material behaviours are determined by its function. Following a qualitative literature review to identify what housing functions are and investigate their effects on the housing system, we explore the applicability of such functions in Swiss tenants’ residential mobility. Results show that multiple functions co-exist in the housing realm, each of which determines various human (i.e. residential preferences) and material (i.e. dwelling forms) behaviours that vary according to given societal and environmental structural elements (e.g. geography, culture). We also observe that housing functions potentially provide the missing link between the determinants of tenants’ residential mobility.

The interaction between residential preferences and dwellings is a complex system whose function thus far remains insufficiently explored. In this paper, we investigate housing functions as orchestrators of households’ residential mobility in the context of Swiss rental housing. We propose a theoretical multi-step model and use survey data from 878 Swiss tenants to inspect the model’s linkages. From the statistical analysis, we firstly observe that tenants’ residential satisfaction is more likely to increase when the gap between ideal housing functions and those actually fulfilled by the current dwelling decreases. Secondly, results show that the effectiveness of an event (e.g. a job opportunity) in triggering the move is significantly related to both residential satisfaction and the functions the dwelling fulfils prior to the trigger. Thirdly, findings show that these trigger events can be grouped into three types: radical change, problem-solving and opportunity. With a medium effect size, a radical change was found to bring about the strongest change in housing functions between past and current dwellings. Lastly, in line with the hypothesis that residential preferences vary over the life course, socio-demographic characteristics and tenancy types are found to be significant explanatory variables for households’ ideal housing functions. By disentangling the complexity of the housing system, the proposed multi-step model can be used to integrate households’ preferences with supply-side constraints in agent-based model simulations, thereby contributing to fostering the provision of quality housing, i.e. dwellings able to meet the needs of current and future occupants.

During the first wave of COVID-19, residents’ health and well-being were challenged as residential environments suddenly had to accommodate most of the functions of an urban system. Although scholars and practitioners have proposed reconsidering dwelling requirements, their top-down approach overlooks the agency of residents whose preferences might have changed during the confinement. This paper investigates the effects of the first wave of COVID-19 on residential preferences in Switzerland. Adopting a systems perspective, we use an online survey of residents (N = 5378) to explore the extent to which the functions assigned to ideal dwellings have changed during the pandemic and relate these shifts to socio-demographic characteristics, changes in leisure activities, and respondents’ environment conditions. Results indicate that at least one ideal function changed in importance for 60% of the respondents. The desire for a place for self-representation increased, whereas a place for meeting basic needs evinced the largest loss in importance. Our regression models enable us to identify two profiles of residents who responded differently to residential stress. We argue that housing owners, practitioners and policy-makers should empower inhabitants to respond to current and future challenges by acting on and changing their residential environment for their health and well-being.