International Planning Studies 7(1), 55-87, 2002 WILLINGNESS TO PAY FOR SOCIAL HOUSING ATTRIBUTES: A Case Study from Chile Margarita Greene School of Architecture, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile El Comendador 1916, Providencia, Santiago, Chile Tel: 56-2-686 5603; Fax: 56-2-231 5489; e-mail: mgreenez@puc.cl Juan de Dios Ortúzar Department of Transport Engineering, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile Casilla 306, Cod. 105, Santiago 22, Chile Tel: 56-2-686 4822; Fax: 56-2-553 0281; e-mail: jos@ing.puc.cl ABSTRACT In the last 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 identifying first, 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 we estimated discrete choice models, which allowed us to derive the relative weight of (and subjective valuation, or willingness to pay for) each such attribute. The paper presents the methodological features of the project and discusses its main results. INTRODUCTION The last decades have seen a significant move in the governmental approach towards providing social housing for the poorest sectors in developing countries. The conventional (and rather optimistic) approach, which sought to deliver complete dwellings massively to the population, has been replaced by a progressive, more participative, approach that considers the provision of minimal solutions to be improved later directly by the own beneficiaries. In Chile, for example, during the 17 years of military rule social housing programmes took basically two forms: • Basic Housing Programme (BHP), where traditional houses of some 32 m 2 were assigned to people on the basis of their housing needs and subject to a minimum saving’s capacity. • Neighbourhood Upgrading Programme (NUP), where informal settlements were legalised and provided with minimum infrastructure (public lighting and kerbs on roads) and a sanitary unit fully connected to services (water, drainage and electricity) for each plot. Although the NUP was initially conceived as a health-based line of action because it aimed at improving sanitary conditions, it proved to be a highly efficient progressive housing programme. It benefited from the use of the inhabitants building capacity for consolidating minimum solutions, and from recognising the value of what was already built, both physically and socially. In fact, some of the regularised settlements -although not all- developed into residential areas with adequate dwellings and rich social communities (see Greene, 1991).