Budget Builds: Affordable Home Solutions.

Abstract

<p><b>Affordable housing is becoming an increasing issue in New Zealand as current house prices are increasing expeditiously, severely affecting first home buyers with no pre-existing assets. The purpose of this paper is to rethink the way we inhabit homes by examining developing countries approaches of incremental and self-help construction to generate affordable solutions. Although successful incremental designs have been reached in a third world approach, little research shows how these ideas can benefit first home buyers in a first world context with aid from prefabrication. This paper investigates the specific context of New Zealand through a digital and physical experimental approach of design. </b></p> <p>The resulting design proposal develops expandable homes that allow inexperienced users access to engage in self-help building methods to achieve cost reductions. Design considerations are influenced by affordability, construction, and income to develop a preliminary understanding on how the combination of incremental and self-help techniques could prove an affordable platform for first home buyers. </p> <p>Analysis of the developed design highlights that a cost-effective outcome is not possible through standard forms of prefabrication. As the material and manufacturing processes chosen to allow engagement of inexperienced users was not cost-effective, additional research is found to be needed to generate an alternative solution.</p>

Hybrid Study of Quantitative–Qualitative Analysis to Recognize the Most Cost-Effectiveness Criteria to Develop Affordable Mass Housing

“…The most affordable houses are manufactured homes, modular homes, mobile homes, container houses, integrated dome roof houses, tiny homes, and modular homes. Smaller homes allow for increased density and in areas where land value is very high; this can create significant cost savings for buyers [48]. An interesting idea is homes created with durable and energy-efficient materials and designed to be livable with little utility costs.…”

“…Fast methods must be used to decrease the construction time. In most cases, the use of new materials significantly reduces the load on the base, which makes it possible to use prefabricated, lightweight foundations [48,50,51].…”

“…Other considerations in affordable housing projects are plan creation, using local resources, building in phases, attention to mixed-income housing, designing for the future, being flexible [52], keeping it simple, maintenance planning, enough parking, prioritizing the preservation and rehabilitation [53], considering the use of existing assets, creating flexible local funds, developer subsidies, easing development regulations [54], encouraging old residents to participate in the program, focusing on energy efficiency [46], alternative development models instead of traditional methods [48], sustainable public houses, reducing the height of public houses, improving the laws, regulations, and standards, establishing the government approach to involve all parties to help solve problems, creating short streets with limited entry to residents' areas, creating a pedestrian path to support walkability, exploring the residents' needs, choosing natural and local construction materials, bringing nature inside the house, considering social aspects, and identifying residents' social needs [41]. Some criteria should be paid attention to in the affordable housing design, which will be used for the low-income groups.…”