An Investigation into Design Criteria for Affordable Housing Supply

Abstract

Affordable housing provision constitutes a very large scheme in any countries due to income distribution and national development. The supply of housing depends on many activities and processes. The purpose of the houses is to meet the requirement of the householders therefore design criteria must address the users' requirements. The establishment of the design criteria constitutes an important activity at the initial phase of the housing development. The design criteria are prepared by the design team in collaboration with many stakeholders especially the householders. Housinsg design criteria are the requirements that must be considered prior to construction of the housing. Lack of adequate information on the design criteria would lead to poor householders' satisfactions, increase in maintenance cost, abandonments and completed but not occupy housing. In Malaysia, many of these consequences are prevalent. However, while information on the house owners' requirements is inconclusive, this current research set out to investigate the design criteria of affordable housing. The increase in the affordable housing gap in Malaysia can be reduced if the designers have a comprehensive understanding of users' requirements and the design criteria. Through a cross sectional survey questionnaire, comprising 25 criteria, 7 criteria were found to be extremely critical. The Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin measure of sampling adequacy indicated that the strength of the relationships among variables was strong (KMO =0.716). Bartlett's test of sphericity, which tests the overall significance of all the correlations within the correlation matrix, was significant χ2 (325) = 1825.075, p<0.001), indicating the data were drawn from the same population and that the criteria were related.Sustainability considerations are now being considered by the providers of affordable housing. Deductively, the results lead to the conclusion that a major factor responsible for the poor homebuyers / homeo ccupiers dissatisfactions is the lack of considerations of the criteria that impact significantly on the buyers/occupiers choice. The findings are significant for developers, urban planners, banks, policy makers and the academia.