DISTINGUISHING THE DECREPIT FROM THE OLD: IS BUILDING AGE A GOOD PROXY FOR BUILDING PERFORMANCE?

摘要

People often take building age as a proxy for building performance, and thus equate old buildings with decrepit buildings. In Hong Kong, a number of public policies also use building age as a criterion to screen off eligible applications for subsidies. The belief in the conveyance of information on building performance by building age rests on the traditional wisdom that building fabrics and building services will wear and tear and ultimately become obsolete over time. However, if building maintenance and management is in place, it is uncertain how much information building age can still convey. There has seldom been any empirical test in this regard, due to the lack of an objective method to quantify building performance. This paper aims to fill this gap by examining the relationship between building age and its performance in respect of health and safety based on results from a standardized assessment of the health and safety conditions of 134 residential buildings in Hong Kong. Our preliminary results confirmed that there was a significant negative relationship between building age and its health and safety conditions. However, the 20-year cutoff adopted in most public policies was not supported by the empirical results. In addition, we analytically show that the use of building age as a decision tool for resource allocation may lead to inefficiency, and accordingly propose three solutions.