Towards Lowering the Cost of Houses in Palestine: New Prospective

Abstract

The main aim of this research is to develop an approach to lower the cost of housing while ensuring adequate environment and health conditions to Palestinian people. This will ultimately enable more people of limited income to own their own houses. To satisfy this main aim, many specific objectives were achieved. These objectives include the followings: Investigation of influencing factors that affect the cost of housing projects in all phases. Determination of criteria for economic housing. Proposing an approach to lower the cost of housing. Investigation of the significant of the developed approach using a real-life case study and developing prototype design example for low cost housing project that satisfies the developed approach. Many researches in several countries of the world were reviewed by the researcher who also studied in-depth the local Palestinian experience in order to investigate all influencing factors that affect the housing cost. The researcher also reflected his experience within the proposed approach for lowering the housing cost. A group of experts from Gaza Strip and West Bank were interviewed in order to acquire more data and to test and modify the proposed approach. The developed approach consists of five phases. These are Strategy, Planning and Design, Procurement, Execution, and Evaluation. The developed approach depends on developing new criteria for the planning and design of low-cost housing projects, developing new construction system (procurement), optimal use of building materials, and proposing suitable financial programs. This approach will lead to create more housing units, introduce suitable area of the housing units, reduce the construction duration and reduce the project overhead. The real life case study showed that the approach has satisfied the objective of this research by lowering the housing cost to nearly 20% of total cost. A comparison between the original and proposed design was conducted by the researcher. This comparison aims to introduce the cost reduction. The total cost saving reached nearly 20% of total cost. The developed approach can be applied in other countries because the researcher used percentages instead of absolute value for the cost reduction elements. The main recommendation for public and private housing sectors is to use the proposed approach when introducing new low cost housing projects.