A post-construction evaluation of long-term success in LEED-certified residential communities

Project success has been the focus of several studies and traditionally, the iron triangle factors (time, cost, and scope) have been the focus in evaluating project success. However recently, the importance of the long-term evaluation of project success has been highlighted, which evaluates the successful performance of the projects at the post-construction stage with a focus on three main aspects of sustainability, satisfaction, and life cycle performance. This study evaluates multiple aspects of long-term project success by setting sustainability as the baseline and finding the relationships between the performance of the built environment and residential satisfaction in sustainable residential communities. This study was conducted in two phases; in the first phase, the relationship between the actual performance of infrastructure and sustainability of LEED-certified residential communities was evaluated to compare the consistency of sustainability evaluation criteria in theory and practice. In the second phase, the perceived performance of the discussed infrastructure attributes as well as several building and neighborhood attributes were evaluated to understand their relationships with residential satisfaction and test the consistency of sustainability evaluation criteria with people’s perception and judgments in determining the long-term success of these projects. The data for the first phase of the research was collected from www. usgbc. org and walkscore. com and in the second phase, an online survey was conducted to collect data from the residents of LEED-certified residential communities as the experiment group (n=192) and the residents of conventional residential communities as the control group (n=183). The first phase of this study used a multiple regression analysis to evaluate the relationship between infrastructure performance and sustainability. In the second phase, a confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was performed to validate the measurement model. A structural equation modeling (SEM) was then conducted to evaluate the relationships between the perceived performance of the built environment and residential satisfaction. The most influential attributes in determining residential satisfaction were then determined through path analyses and finally, a multiple-group CFA (MGCFA) was carried out to evaluate the effect of sustainability on the perceived performance of the built environment and residential satisfaction. As one of the important findings of this study, it was indicated that evaluation of factors such as walking infrastructure that is considered as an important criterion in determining sustainability shows discrepancy in theory and practice. Besides, LEED-certified community residents illustrated the very high importance of this factor in determining satisfaction. This finding highlighted the importance of considering the users' perceptions and judgments in developing sustainability standards. This study contributes to the body of knowledge by developing a comprehensive post-construction evaluation model that considers multiple aspects of the long-term project success by including the feedback and judgments of residents regarding their living environment. The findings of this research can be beneficial for the improvement of housing and community sustainability standards by including the users' opinions in decision-making.