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Affordable housing has emerged as a key issue in urban development in a wide range of countries. Themes in research on affordable housing development across the world are reviewed. Affordable Housing Communities for low income households have been built on a large scale in developing countries such as China during the last two decades, mainly in urban fringe areas. Evidence on the impact of the location on access of residents to services is rare. Studying Nanjing, this paper compares spatial access to services between Affordable Housing Communities and Other Housing Communities by measuring distances and imputing walking time between residential land parcels and facilities. Affordable Housing Communities have significantly poorer access than Other Housing Communities, because of poor neighbourhood provision of low order services and poor access to high order services. A household survey of Affordable Housing Communities and Other Housing Communities records the daily lives, degrees of satisfaction and community attachments of residents. Residents in affordable housing have low degrees of satisfaction, weak community attachments and desire to move. The findings emphasize that service provision should be planned to keep pace with Affordable housing construction, so that these communities become better places to live. • Affordable Housing Communities (ACs) are found in Nanjing's periphery. • Access to services was measured as walking time from land parcels to facilities. • Residents in ACs have poor access to health care, schools and shopping malls. • AC residents were dissatisfied with the lack of access and wished to move. • Planners need to invest in making services accessible to AC residents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the unprecedented pace of urbanization in recent decades, urban vacant residences have increased dramatically. The problem of numerous vacant residences has been severely criticized. The lack of comprehensive data obstructs revealing the spatiotemporal dynamics and the contributing factors of the vacant residences at a fine scale. This study proposes a feasible and general-purpose framework to analyze the vacant residences using municipal water consumption data. First, a residential vacancy identification method is proposed to identify the vacant residences, and the spatiotemporal characteristics of the vacant residences are analyzed using the spatial analysis methods. Second, the relationships between the residential vacancies and the service environments of the neighborhoods are examined using the random forest method. The framework was applied in Changshu city, China, and the results revealed a concentric circular spatial structure for residences. The results also indicated that the diversity of the facilities and services (FASs) has the highest impact on residential vacancies. As the degree of enrichment of the FASs approximates 1 or the percentage/diversity of the FASs increase, the residential vacancy length decreases. This study not only draws a detailed picture of vacant residences but also sheds light on policy implications for mitigating residential vacancies. • The municipal infrastructure and service data are first applied for monitoring residential vacancy at a fine scale. • The proposed framework reveals the spatiotemporal dynamics of vacant residences and the impact of service factors on them. • The areas in need of improvement and the contributing factors for mitigating residential vacancies can be identified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]