Design Criterions For Low-Income Housing

All people have the right to own a suitable houses, this subject becomes not a personal issue or local community advertence, but an international legislations subject, therefore it is very important to research in design criterions for low income housing to reach a conformance between building cost and finance competence for this group of people and because of the house is an essential need for human life, these subjects were studied in the first chapter of this thesis in additional to other topics like population studies, housing institutions, polices and strategies to solve housing problems in Palestine, housing funded institutions, their polices and the shortage in funded resources. The success of the housing projects depends on the understanding of the requirements of the inhabitants, their social, economical backgrounds and their materialistic potentials. Therefore the second chapter of this thesis studied the housing restrictions (human, economical, environmental) to be an entrance to study the different existing types of low-income housing in urban regions and reach for responding difficulties and the role of the different directions in saving houses. The third chapter of this thesis studied the social, economical, health, and educational characteristics of low-income areas to reach better understanding of their needs, problems, requirements and to provide them with suitable solutions guarantee for them soft life. We discuss, analysis here also some existing examples for low cost housing (Al Aboor city in Egypt) and evaluating the procedures followed to reduce the cost, and achieving the goal. The fourth chapter of this thesis studied the suitable architectural design, which is the connection point between the different income levels and the peaky cost for constructing housing units, also issues related to this subject like gathering housing units, exploiting architectural spaces, furniture elements, and structural styles to reach the actualization of economical adequacy. And at the same time conserving the Islamic civilization features. Also we studied in this chapter the architectural theories which concentrate on reducing houses cost, human scale, and finally the design of living rooms, dining rooms, bed rooms, kitchens, baths. The fifth chapter of this thesis studied the waste in building industry, its reasons and how to abolishing them and reducing waste to the minimum, this subject have a big influence in reducing the cost of low income houses, and increasing production without additional investments. My research discuss waste in materials, labors, time, instruments, design, bad implementation, also legislative sides in building industry, characteristics of building industry, obstacles facing this industry, recommended building industries and co-ordination between different building sectors. The sixth chapter of this thesis studied labors, availability, increasing literal efficiency, labors organization, qualifications levels, charges and training, which guarantees safety execution, perfecting, cost control. Because size of labors form 35% of the total construction cost, we must increase the productivity of labors through improving the performance of labors implementing construction, also we discuss here the balance between demand and supply for housing units in the society, and as a result for the high demand on housing units we get unsuitable houses which need a lot of maintenance, and which have short hypothetical age, consequently we must concentrate on regulations, warranties, rules controlling this process. At the end we summarized our results and recommendations in the Seventh.