The world’s urban population is expected to grow from 3.6 billion in 2011 to 6.3 billion in 2050, while 94% of the increase will occur in developing countries (UN, 2012). It is estimated that 828 million people from developing countries live in slums and substandard housing while the number will rise to 1.4 billion by 2020 (Al-Saadi and Abdou, 2016; Desai, 2012; Govender et al., 2011). Consequently, accommodating the poor poses a significant challenge to developing countries during the urbanization process. To address this issue, affordable housing has become the agenda of many governments in a bid to improve the living condition of low income households (Lin et al., 2015). Affordable housing usually refers to housing that is affordable to specified eligible households whose income is not adequate for them to access appropriate housing in the market (Winston and Montserrat, 2007).

The main target of affordable housing programs is to improve the housing affordability, especially for low-income households, based on government initiatives (Azevedo et al., 2010). Although many affordable housing programs have been initiated, there is a debate on whether the housing affordability of low-income households has been improved. For example, living in affordable housing might increase the spending on health care, energy bill, transportation and so on (Fuhry and Wells, 2013; Govender et al., 2011; Isalou et al., 2014). Charoenkit and Kumar (2014) argued the increment of spending on non-housing issues has deteriorated housing affordability. This leads to low demand and abandonment, causing a huge waste of public resources.