SEA presents on Post-Occupancy Surveys at the Housing Oregon Conference
The 2024 Housing Oregon Conference, Oregon’s annual networking and education event for housing professionals across the state, brought together over 1,000 participants and offered 60 workshops. Scott Edwards Architecture's Principal Hayley Purdy and Senior Associate Eugenia Fama-Higgins presented “The Value of a Post-Occupancy Survey in Affordable Housing,” a key component of bringing community engagement full circle in a responsive design process.
Post-occupancy surveys offer vital insight into how people experience a built design. This insight is valuable not only to architects to apply lessons learned in future work, but also to developers and service providers as a means to understand the needs of their residents better. In the presentation, Hayley and Eugenia discussed the benefits of and best practices for performing a post-occupancy survey in multi-family affordable housing.
Best practice takeaways for the multi-family architecture design team include:
Use both generic and specific questions to encourage genuine responses
Limit survey length to 25 questions or less
Place the most important questions at the beginning of the survey
Leave space for resident comments
Provide the surveys in multiple languages
Leave space for open feedback at the end of the survey
Survey ethnicity to understand how design is experienced by specific communities
Balance the types of questions asked to include a mix (design, finishes, building performance, systems, cultural aspects, etc.)
Provide an incentive, gift cards have proven effective
Best practice takeaways for the multi-family ownership team include:
Inform the residents of the survey ahead of time
Survey should be conducted 1-year post-occupancy
Complaints in the first year are expected
Ask Property Management and/or Resident Services for input
Resident Services versus Property Management was better suited to implement the survey with residents
Example of an SEA Post-Occupancy Survey administered to Nueva Esperanza residents.
The presentation provided examples of administering accessible surveys that maximize respondents, ensuring as many voices are heard as possible. It explored how feedback can be applied to support the development team, asset management teams, and design teams in the operation of the development and future affordable housing communities, no matter the client experience level.
Hayley and Eugenia also demonstrated how post-occupancy surveys are connected to early engagement, due diligence, and the design process, and are a valuable tool for measuring the success of design attributes, systems, and the responsiveness of the design. This is shown in two survey questions below for the Nueva Esperanza development. As part of SEA’s early engagement with future residents, we learned from them culturally specific elements and preferences that were important to incorporate. The post-occupancy survey validated our approach to incorporating them, which informs how we apply similar elements moving forward.
The presentation encouraged attendees to rethink the typical design and feedback process. It outlined a comprehensive and community-based design and development approach demonstrating the value of post-occupancy surveys that extend beyond any one project—post-occupancy survey data from one project essentially becomes the first component of feedback in the project that follows. The proposed process also incorporates advocacy as an element that architects can integrate throughout to promote stronger, more effective designs.
You can view the entire presentation on Housing Oregon’s Youtube channel, here.
About the Presenters
Hayley Purdy is a Principal at Scott Edwards Architecture and leads a team that pursues community-focused work. Her passion and experience, along with her ability to push design forward, have given her a versatile skillset as a designer and leader. Hayley’s work often includes significant community involvement and creating unique, integrated spaces that are highly contextualized. She cares deeply about design’s role in bettering people’s lives, and her past work in affordable housing, community-based healthcare, libraries, adaptive reuse, and historic preservation has proven particularly rewarding.
Eugenia Fama-Higgins is a licensed architect from Argentina and a Senior Associate at Scott Edwards Architecture with over 15 years of experience. She is a passionate and innovative designer who prioritizes equity in architecture by advocating for robust community engagement and context-driven solutions. Eugenia is conscious of how design can change and impact our environment, health, and community, and it is through this lens that she approaches her work. Eugenia’s primary focus is on affordable housing, senior living, and community-based projects, and she finds the collaborative nature of these projects leads to impactful, human-scaled results.
