Housing type as a moderator of residential satisfaction: a comparative study of apartment and townhouse social housing in an Giang, Vietnam

Vietnam’s rapid urbanization has intensified social housing demand, yet most research focuses on apartments in major cities, leaving townhouse social housing and the Mekong Delta understudied. This study compares residential satisfaction between two social housing projects developed by the same provider in An Giang province: First Home An Giang (apartment) and First Home Binh Hoa (townhouse). A 41-item survey was administered to 209 residents (100 apartment and 109 townhouse households), covering unit, building, neighborhood and social interaction characteristics. Reliability was high (Cronbach’s α = .86 to .94), and exploratory factor analysis confirmed the four-domain structure (KMO = .90). Apartment residents reported significantly higher satisfaction in all four domains with large effect sizes (Cohen’s d = 0.78 to 1.18). Hierarchical regression showed that unit and social interaction characteristics predicted satisfaction in the apartment group, while unit and neighborhood characteristics drove satisfaction in the townhouse group. Moderation confirmed that housing type conditioned the effects of neighborhood and social interaction domains, extending Amerigo’s systemic model with a typological moderator. PLS-SEM with bootstrap and MICOM-MGA reproduced the pattern. Findings inform typology-differentiated standards for Vietnam’s social housing programme: neighbourhood infrastructure for townhouse projects and community-space programming for apartment projects.