As global urbanization accelerates, the sustainable renewal of urban communities has emerged as a central focus in urban development. Sustainability assessment, encompassing design, construction, and management, serves as a vital quantitative tool for monitoring urban renewal processes and fostering sustainable community development. In recent years, governments and research institutions worldwide have developed various assessment systems to advance urban sustainability, ranging from tools for individual buildings to entire cities. This study begins by reviewing exemplary cases of sustainable urban community renewal, such as the Sino-Singapore Tianjin Eco-City and Masdar City in the UAE. These projects, by adopting sustainability assessment tools tailored to local climates, economies, and cultures, have successfully achieved holistic community sustainability. In contrast, projects lacking robust assessment frameworks often face challenges, such as ambiguous objectives and implementation difficulties. The study further examines established sustainability assessment systems, including LEED-ND, BREEAM Communities, and DGNB-NS, which address areas such as historic district revitalization, environmental improvements, and optimizing built environments. Despite their global prominence, these standards are largely designed for developed countries and struggle to address China’s unique urban renewal challenges, including aging infrastructure, residential environment upgrades, and transportation network optimization. Furthermore, community-scale assessment systems remain underdeveloped, offering limited applicability and maturity compared to tools for buildings or entire cities. Given the distinct social, economic, and environmental characteristics of cities, existing frameworks often fail to capture the specific conditions of Chinese urban communities due to subjective judgments and regional constraints. Therefore, developing a sustainability assessment system tailored to China’s context is a critical task for guiding community renewal and promoting sustainable development. This study proposes a comprehensive assessment framework for urban community renewal in China, offering precise guidance for sustainable development. By integrating qualitative expert input with quantitative analysis, the study establishes a multidimensional, hierarchical structure of sustainability indicator framework. Key indicators are identified through methods such as the Delphi technique, expert scoring, and literature reviews. Appropriate weights are assigned based on the relative impacts of various factors, using expert knowledge, practical experiences, and mathematical modeling. The framework evaluates community sustainability through quantitative analysis of indicators and aggregates these scores using weighted coefficients to derive an overall score. This process identifies communities requiring priority renewal and highlights critical issues, providing actionable insights for tailored renewal strategies. The framework emphasizes addressing key indicators with significant impacts while incorporating expert perspectives and resident needs to develop targeted solutions. Specifically, the assessment framework comprises four levels—objective, criteria, sub-criteria, and indicators—spanning three core dimensions: environmental ecology, social inclusion, and economicvitality. At the criteria level, core components such as land use, green buildings, and industrial vitality are analyzed. The sub-criteria level captures the community’s actual conditions, while the indicator level includes specific, measurable indicators linked to data collection and analysis. This framework includes three objective layers, 11 criteria layers, 26 sub-criteria layers, and 65 detailed indicators. The environmental ecology dimension evaluates aspects such as land use, green buildings, transportation, resource efficiency, and landscapes. The social inclusion dimension assesses residential environments, social services, safety, and operational management. The economic vitality dimension focuses on economic growth and industrial development. Additionally, the framework introduces an innovative bonus mechanism to encourage the integration of unique local characteristics and indicators. In addition, effective weight allocation is crucial given the varying influence of different factors. The study applies multiple-criteria decision-making (MCDM) methods, including TOPSIS, VIKOR, and GRA for objective weighting, and AHP, ANP, and BWM for subjective weighting. The chosen or integration of these methods ensures a balanced and scientific approach to weight allocation, enhancing decision-making accuracy in complex renewal scenarios. By analyzing community sustainability scores and indicators, the framework identifies priority renewal areas and critical issues. This provides a foundation for developing cost-effective and issue-specific strategies. Additionally, the study underscores the importance of involving community residents and neighborhood committees in refining the framework to align it with actual needs. In the digital era, artificial intelligence (AI) technologies offer transformative potential for sustainability assessments in urban renewal. AI can support data monitoring, processing, decision-making, and resident engagement, contributing to sustainable community development. Future research should further explore AI’s application in advancing intelligent and sustainable urban community renewal.