Multifamily Housing and Resident Life Satisfaction: Evidence from the European Social Survey

Much of the literature on sustainable communities and compact cities calls for higher density housing including multifamily dwellings. Some case studies suggest problems with such dwellings. However, rigorous comparative research on this topic has not been conducted to date. This paper draws on a high quality, comparative dataset, the European Social Survey, to analyse a) the quality of multifamily dwellings in European urban areas, b) the characteristics of residents of these dwellings, c) their life satisfaction compared with those living in detached housing and d) the relative importance of built form in explaining life satisfaction. One of the main findings from the multivariate analyses is that built form, including residing in multifamily housing, is not a statistically significant predictor of life satisfaction when you control for standard predictors of life satisfaction (e.g. health, employment and income) and housing and neighbourhood quality.