Assessing Affordable Housing Using the 4A Framework of Marketing: the Case of Iran's Mehr Housing Project

In recent decades, housing has been a growing challenge in Iranian society, particularly in the major cities. In response, the Iranian government created the Mehr Housing Project (MHP) to provide affordable housing to low-income populations in cities around the country. However, once the project was completed, a number of shortcomings, including low building quality and distance from active urban districts, gradually surfaced. This paper assesses residents’ satisfaction with the affordable housing project using the criteria of the 4A framework of marketing: acceptability, affordability, accessibility, and awareness. The MHP in Pardis City, a suburb of Tehran, was selected as the case study for this paper to measure the correlation between the 4A criteria and resident satisfaction. The study analyzed 326 questionnaires from residents from three affordable-housing complexes. The results showed that, among the studied criteria, affordability had the strongest correlation with resident satisfaction (Spearman’s rho = .855), followed by accessibility (Spearman’s rho = .799). The findings could be beneficial for architects and policy makers in designing and building future affordable-housing complexes in Iran.