Sustainable Housing Supplying in Palestine:

Achieving a sustainable supply of affordable housing is a strategic aim for the sustainable development of each country. This study highlights the relationship between local building regulations and the sustainable supply of affordable housing in Palestine. To do so, the paper assesses the building regulations in terms of achieving affordability in housing design. Thus, an assessment framework was developed based on learning from traditional design which proved to cover three values of affordability: collectivity, sharing, and diversity, as well as several factors of changes related to each of these values.

The research data were collected through a survey of the opinions of 30 experts in the field of designing and building affordable housing in three main Palestinian cities: Nablus, Ramallah, and Jenin. The results showed that the need for values of affordability increases at the urban level compared to the single-building level. The paper’s main finding is to establish an approach for a sustainable supply of affordable housing based on collectivity, sharing, and diversity. This approach can be a high-potential step for achieving sustainable development in Palestine. Therefore, several affordability-encouraging suggestions were made for improving the building regulations in Palestine based on the results of the paper.

Housing has always been considered one of the most important sectors in the economies of all countries, for its broad and intense linkages with other sectors which stimulate economic development in the country as a whole, Moreover, the social and human aspects of the housing sector tend to raise its value since shelter is considered one of the basic and vital needs of the well-being of humans.

For this reason, developing the housing sector is an important task to meet the challenges of human settlement. Devise mechanisms and systems by which an adequate and steady flow of long-term financial resources from both the public and private sectors, could be mobilized and channeled into human settlement development and particularly in housing upgrading. Therefore, there is a tendency in several countries around the world to adopt different strategies to develop the housing sector to face the high demand for housing. One of the most important strategies is to encourage the private housing sector to provide the necessary units for limited-income people instead of providing housing directly to these people by governments.

This encouragement requires an institutional and legal system that provides the appropriate environment for the private sector to invest in affordable housing. Making housing affordable generally means that the total costs (rents, mortgages, basic utilities, and maintenance) of appropriate housing total should be less than 30% of a household’s income. Thus encouraging the private sector to invest in affordable housing is one of the practical solutions to mitigate the housing crisis.

In Palestine -and most developing countries-, there is a shortage of affordable housing supply because of the presence of many obstacles. One of the most common is the absence of housing strategies and projects that address the needs of the largest population groups, those with limited incomes. The complex political situation and the failure to reach solutions that would enable the Palestinians to control all the lands of the West Bank, and Gaza thus greatly increased the prices of land and the costs of building construction and transportation.

Likewise, the lack of qualified financing programs to meet the needs in the housing sector, the absence of programs to finance affordable housing for people with limited income, and the high interest rate on housing loans make individuals resort to self-financing, which reduces their chances of obtaining suitable housing. As a result of all these obstacles; a lot of Palestinian families cannot afford adequate housing, and because of that they are living now in very crowded conditions and paying high rents.