Affordable Housing

ABSTRACT

Development of ‘Affordable housing’ has become an urgent and important topic of discussion in India. Unlike in western countries where the social welfare system has been set up for many years and the public housing system also is mature, in most of Asian countries, the social welfare systems are still weak in relation to their large amount of low-income populations. The gap between rich and poor is considerable large, and is still increasing, many people with low-income could not afford their own houses since the minimum down-payment and the entry-requirement of real estate market are both increasingly high, the ‘Affordable housing’ is therefore very difficult to be developed appropriately under this circumstances. This paper

The so called housing is the house that built for residential use which provides basically private and secure place for people to live in. There are many different ways to classified housing, for example, according the provided party standard, these are commercial housing and public housing; according to the business standard, there are general commercial housing and low-profit housing; according to the customers standard, there are social housing and business housing. Housing is not only has the characteristics of commercial profit but social security protection. Affordable housing is an important part of social housing security protection, provided by local government to the customers who is low income household or has lower competition power in social market. Many countries government use affordable housing policy to organize the social security system.

The definition of affordable housing can be found in article that written by

Moreover, affordable housing is provided or organized by central or local government to the low-income households and the people who has less competition in housing market.

The characteristics of affordable housing can be summarized as follow:

1. Government involving. As the main provider of affordable housing is not commercial real estate developers but the governments, affordable housing project is planned by the government including the location, housing type, building standards and the level of house price.

2. Consumers are fixed. There has limitation for the affordable housing consumers, like low-income crowd. Government has the principles for affordable housing purchase, like family members, income level and background. It should be noted that affordable housing market is opened to specific consumers.

3. Complicated applicant selection. In general speaking, the number of affordable housing supply is less than the demand, because if the supply is higher than demand, it will fall down the housing price and affect the commercial housing