Improving social value through facilities management: Swedish housing companies

Abstract

Housing companies create, maintain and develop an important part of the built environment. Besides their core activity of providing housing, they can increasingly also mitigate societal problems and contribute to social, environmental and financial sustainability. One contribution to sustainability by housing companies is to create meaningful activities for tenants that benefit their employability, skills, careers, and physical and mental wellbeing. These ‘activity interventions’ are used as a vehicle to create social value. However, it is unclear what sort of impact these interventions have, and how they affect housing companies’ financial value. This paper investigates: (1) Swedish housing companies’ initiatives to provide meaningful ‘activity interventions’ for tenants; (2) what value these interventions create; and (3) how social value creation relates to financial value. Observations and interviews (n = 23) with Swedish housing companies are mapped onto a social value creation framework. The findings reveal several types of employment, educational and leisure activities that have been created for tenants, and the areas in which these initiatives create the most social value. Social value creation is often used as risk management to mitigate issues related to criminality, welfare-dependent tenants and decreased property values. Practice relevance The paper explains how housing companies can contribute to a more socially sustainable built environment. By creating meaningful activities for tenants such as jobs, vocational training and leisure activities, housing companies can create social value for tenants, the neighbourhood, the organisation itself and wider society. In turn, this creates financial value for housing companies by deterring criminality, reducing vandalism, increasing individual and neighbourhood wellbeing, and raising property values. Evidence is provided for housing management about a type of practice (activity interventions) that has identifiable benefits to residential communities. It highlights where and for whom different activity interventions add value. This can help housing companies to make more informed decisions about their social value activities in order to provide the most value for the specific needs of each neighbourhood.