title: DEVELOPMENT OF AFFORDABLE HOUSING FRAMEWORK FOR LOW-INCOME HOUSEHOLDS IN PAKISTAN
Creators: name: Sindhu, A
Publisher: name: Liverpool John Moores University
Year: 2021

description: Provision of affordable housing is a global issue and key agenda of UN Habitat, ‘housing for everyone’ (ILO, 1974). It is believed that a decent and good quality affordable housing is a basic and fundamental need for humans and can help to achieve several socio-economic policy objectives (UN-Habitat, 2008; Rizvi, 2015; Shaikh, 2016; Anacker, 2019; Commission, 2019). Housing affordability is mostly assessed based on the income to expense (IER). However, researchers (Anacker, 2019; Affordable Housing Commission, 2019; Matt and Marshall, 2019) are agreed that housing affordability is more than housing (rent, mortgage and utility bills) and non-housing expenses (commuting, health and education expenses, etc.). A household should not spend more than 30% of their household income on housing costs; and social and environmental criteria should be considered to assess the housing affordability Mulliner, Malys and Maliene, 2016; Napoli, Trovato and Giuffrida, 2016; Meen, 2018; Affordable Housing Commission UK, 2019; Matt and Marshal, 2019), especially for low-income households. The government of Pakistan is unable to meet housing requirements due to rapid urbanization and uncontrolled population growth in the country. Available affordable housing developments either are too expensive for low-income households or are built in the periphery of the major cities. Households with low-income ($2 a day) face non-housing expenses (especially traveling cost and time) due to lack of employment opportunities near these affordable housing developments (Rizvi, 2015; Kakakhel, 2014; Gerrity, 2016; Shaikh, 2017; Hasan and Arif, 2018; Islamabad, 2018; Zameen.com, 2019). Consequently, a substantial proportion of population lives in sub-standard and low-quality houses or slums near the town centres of major cities or go homeless. All the housing finance organizations including House Building Finance Company Limited (HBFC: a public body) use IER to assess the housing affordability; and they do not consider any social and environmental criteria. Therefore, there was a need to develop an affordable housing framework that can be used to assess the housing affordability of low-income households. The aim of this research is to establish an affordable housing framework that can be used to assess the housing affordability and to develop future affordable housing developments for the low-income households in Pakistan. A rigorous literature review helped to develop housing affordability assessment criteria (HAAC). In order to bring together cross-national housing information, and to get an approval for developed HAAC, housing professionals in Pakistan were asked to rank them on importance scale. The Delphi methods were used due to their hybrid nature within the mixed research methodology framework. Some statistically significant tests whether to use parametric or non-parametric tests for statistical analysis such as Kolmogorov-Smirnov (K-S); to compare the differences of opinion between housing professionals and the end users’ groups Mann-Whitney U test; Cronbach’s alpha to check the internal consistency (reliability) of the data. The HAAC was reduced into most critical criteria by applying factor analysis tests using Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS). Based on the literature review and the field survey results, this thesis offers an original contribution to knowledge by developing the concept of affordable housing to support the low-income households in Pakistan. The framework contains comprehensive housing affordability assessment criteria (HAAC) and income to expense ratio (IER) threshold to assess the housing affordability of low-income households in Pakistan. Housing stakeholders, housing finance &amp; banking sector and government authorities can use this framework to assess housing affordability for low-income households, provide and monitor good quality affordable housing developments for this segment of population in Pakistan.