Low-cost housing projects are become the focus of many countries to provide suitable housing for low income groups through following some policies and programs. The self -help housing is one of these programs that meets the actual needs of the population within the framework of appropriate support from the state. This program was applied in many countries such as (England, United States and South Africa…) with various types and different mechanisms according to the role of each people and government in the building process.

The Egyptian government has adopted this program in core housing projects during the nineties by giving the people land and part of houses to complete it according their needs, but with the decline of government funding, the government introduced another type of projects which called Ebny Betak project through the Mubarak National Housing Projects in 2005.The government sells the land with low price for low-income people in this project to build their housing themselves with the government support during all stages of building. Despite of the success of this project in building new houses, it faced some difficulties that impact on not achieving the desired goals such as the high cost of building residential units and the Medium-income groups are the beneficiary rather than low-income. Consequently, the paper aims to formulate the successful mechanisms of implementing the self-help program in new cities by reviewing the previous successful experiments in this field, furthermore analysis the project of Ebny Betak in six October city and clarify its main advantages and disadvantages to put the ways of solving its problems and achieve well organized self-help housing project in the future.

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