Quality Affordable Housing Concept:
The provision of adequate, good, or quality housing for the population has always been a major challenge and aim for many nations in the world, particularly developing countries. However, most of these countries suffer from the same problem, the gap in the low-income housing sector is increasing day after day. Moreover, the main problem is that the population is increasing, and their needs are changing constantly. Governments all over the world are trying to reach most of the affordability ratio in the housing sector for low-income.
Yet there are many concepts that should be considered such as Quality Affordable Housing Concept. The paper has a main aim which is to evaluate affordable housing projects based on quality affordable housing criteria. Therefore, qualitative, quantitative, analytical, and comparative methodologies are chosen to reach the paper’s aim. Four housing projects were selected to be case studies for this paper: Mehr in Iran, Dharavai in India, AlSharq in Jordan, and Bashayer Al-Khair in Egypt.
Housing is an essential aspect in life. In 1977 Lazenby suggested three ways that architects, planners, and social scientists can work together in developing a framework for the provision of good quality affordable housing:
a) The architect or planner must gather information that will be integrated to produce good quality affordable housing according to the needs of residents.
b) Architects and social scientists have to collaborate in the evaluation of a residential environment from the point of view of the users.
c) Architects, planners, and social scientists should gather their talents in efforts to set those dimensions of housing and residential areas that contribute to the overall quality of life.
Therefore, low-income housing is one of the essential structures of any housing development strategy. However, affordability in the housing sector turned into an obstacle to the housing development process especially in Egypt and India.
This study aims to analyze four different affordable housing projects based on the criteria of quality affordable housing. The researcher had to choose qualitative and quantitative methodologies to outcome the criteria of quality affordable housing. Also, analytical, field and comparative methodologies were used to clarify the case studies of this paper. The case studies were selected according to several aspects: the similar scale of the projects, number of households, number of housing units, the aim of the projects, and type of affordability.
The provision of adequate, good, or quality housing for the population has always been a major challenge and task for most nations in the world particularly the developing countries Egypt, India, Iran, and Brazil. As such various measures have been undertaken towards this end.
Mehr Projects is a housing for low-income, constructed in 2007. These projects were constructed in three locations: new cities, land around cities, and old areas to facilitate modernization and improvement. Mehr is still going project aimed to reach one million and five thousand housing units. This number of units will cover the six million population of the country, which is approximately 12% of the urban population. The Ministry of Housing, Housing Foundation, Ministry of Cooperatives, Central Bank, Municipalities, and Central Insurance collaborated together to construct Mehr Housing Projects.
This project’s main aims are to bring equality between the supply and demand of housing by omitting the land price, housing for low-income people and poor people, control and prevent the skyrocketing prices of land and housing, housing boost production and increase production volumes of housing and reducing the cost of housing (Rent, mortgage and buy). Also, it is aimed to give solutions for future housing needs, and justice in access to quality affordable housing.
Therefore, the researcher had to choose Mehr to evaluate the project using quality affordable housing criteria. First criteria: Location and accessibility: In Mehr housing projects the ones that are located inside of the cities have many more benefits than the ones that are located outside of the cities. They have better access to public transportation but the houses that are located outside the cities suffer from the lack of transportation. However, most of the households in the suburbs, houses are workers in other cities and the big cities next to these suburbs’ projects, the government is ignoring the shortage of transportation system