It has become increasingly important to evaluate housing for
many reasons. First of all, housing has become the target of critics
and the media for being highly unsatisfactory even though there is
little or no empirical evidence to back these claims. Second, evaluating
housing provides the necessary information required for
‘feed-back’ into current housing stock and ‘feed-forward’ into
future projects (Preiser, 1989). It provides the basis for taking decisions
about improvements in current housing stock and about the
design and development of future housing. Third, the idea that an
evaluation of the performance of housing may be conducted makes
housing managers, designers and policy makers more accountable.