The management of the public rental sector has undergone tremendous change worldwide. Especially in China, given the large supply of public rental housing (PRH) in the short term, the management of PRH (PRHM) has been faced with a series of problems. The existing PRHM is unsustainable and a new scheme has been proposed. In this study we analyze whether this new scheme can solve the former management problems and achieve the reform objectives, so as to explore whether the new scheme can really improve the PRHM. We analyzed the new policy, contracts and bidding documents of 19 pilot projects and interviewed some implementation staffs. We found that the well-intended policy mainly proposed three measures: government procurement, new financial arrangement and guided service contents; but that these measures lack specific financial support. Furthermore, there are very few projects that involve full implementation; most of the projects employed a compromise strategy. In general, the new scheme made progress towards solving some of the existing problems, so even if it is selectively implemented, it is still likely to achieve the reform objectives.@en

In the original publication of the article, the first affiliation “School of Public Administration, Hunan University, Changsha, China” was incorrectly repeated as fourth affiliation. The fourth affiliation should be “Building and Real Estate Dept. Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong SAR”. The original article has been corrected.@en

In response to excessive energy consumption and severe pollution, green building has gained increasing attention around the world. Governments’ top-down incentive schemes and consumers’ bottom-up choice preferences are two major channels of residential green building promotion. Regarding the bottom-up route, high liveability performance is critical to ensuring that occupants are willing to make secondary purchases or provide recommendations. Therefore, this paper, using post-occupancy evaluation, aims to evaluate and compare the liveability performance of green and conventional buildings from the perspectives of occupants. The results verified that the eco-label effect (i.e., subjective differences for building types) influenced the occupants’ evaluations of building performance. When controlling for eco-label bias, we found that green buildings were not superior to conventional buildings in terms of liveability. This is highly relevant to evaluations of the orientation of green building certifications that concentrate on the consumption of energy and material resources but neglect the living experience of occupants. In addition, indicators related to thermal comfort (e.g., indoor temperature or frequency of air conditioner use) played an important role in the occupants’ liveability evaluations. These findings provide concrete guidance regarding how the evaluation systems of green building certifications in various countries should be upgraded in the near future.@en