This study aims to illustrate the evolution of housing policies and programs in Malaysia to provide adequate residences for several targeted groups. In order to provide adequate houses to citizens in the country, the government has designed several housing programs for implementation. However, the achievements of housing program implementations vary from one another. PPA1M, an affordable housing program, exceeded its target two years earlier, while other housing programs have yet to achieve their targets. The implementation of this program is also discussed in this work. In Malaysia, the affordability of housing has become a primary public concern due to the hike in house prices, especially in urban areas. According to the National Property Information Centre (NAPIC), the average housing price in Malaysia is recorded at RM330,964 in Q2 2016 (NAPIC, 2016), while the median monthly household income for Malaysians stood at RM4,585, as reported by the Department of Statistics Housing Income Survey 2014 (DOS 2014).

In this regard, the median income indicates that households cannot afford to buy houses priced higher than RM300,000 (Samad et al., 2016). The Median Multiple methodologies is developed by Dermographia International to measure the affordability to own a house, where the affordable category for house prices is capped at three times a household’s annual income (Cheah and Stefanie, 2016). The methodology, which is also recommended by The United Nations Centre for Human Settlements and the World Bank, has reported that the median home price was recorded at 4.4 times the median income in 2014, signaling that households cannot afford to buy a house (Suraya, 2015). The issues of housing affordability were also highlighted by EPU, JPM through the 11th MP document, stating that house prices in most major cities in Malaysia are more than three times the annual median household income, as reported by the World Bank Affordability Index, 2012 (EPU, 2015b).