Housing for the Less Moneyed
Finally it seems the government has hit upon a housing plan that sounds sensible with its involvement of foreign private capital and a thrust upon the requirement of the limited income groups.
Public sector housing in our country has traditionally been confined to providing roofs over the heads of employees belonging to government, autonomous and semi-autonomous organisations. Operating on shoe-string budgets governments could hardly afford building complexes for any segment of the private citizenry. Through the HBFC and NCBs house-building loans were, of course, given to private citizens on behalf of the government. But these could only cater to the needs of the well-to-do with a profit motive, especially in the area of multi-storied housing projects. Then came swarms of real estate builders most of whom operated on a highly commercial concoction of land procured from the owner by parting a certain number of flats of the proposed high-rise to him or her, personal equity pool and borrowing from the bank. Their housing projects and development schemes ancillary thereto have all been the hand-maiden of the elite, by the elite and for the elite. The low and limited income groups have completely been ignored so far in our housing plans and visions.
Therefore, it comes as a breath of fresh air that the government has decided to allow foreign investors to construct housing complexes for the low and middle income brackets on the outskirts of the city. There can be entirely foreign capital-based straightforward housing enclaves like the 30,000-flat construction project Malaysia has offered to build on joint ventures with our Housing Directorate and, better still, with our private sector in an orchestrated bid to provide modern housing to the average urban or suburban dweller. This will connect well with the vision for a developmental dispersal we keep to take the loads off the metropolitan areas.
The Works Ministry and RAJUK need to get focused on the foreign investment-driven massive housing project, something that Malaysia, China, and nearer home Sri Lanka and Thailand have already tried out with significant success in alleviating their urban housing problems.
We need to sound warnings in five areas in order that benefit can be optimised from such projects: One, because the flats will be low-cost they must not be substandard; two, the flat-related ownership and transfer rules must be intelligible and unambiguous; three, there has to be proper management and maintenance of structures that will have some common facilities; four, a code for living in flats will be welcome in view of the ad hocism that has always characterised it. Last but not the least, such housing complexes need to be connected with the broader facilities of marketing, transport, education, et all.
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