Million-rupee units, sector reformsseen as groundwork of budget housing

LAHORE: If the government wanted to provide affordable housing to most of the people, then it would have to shift focus to building housing units costing less than Rs1 million each, while boosting overall development-oriented economic activities, leading economists said.

“For that purpose, people should be attracted to adopt housing in flats. Only a flat can provide better housing facilities to people at affordable rates, especially in the cities,” Dr Nadeem Ul Haque, former deputy chairman planning commission, said keynoting a moot.

The discussion titled “10 million jobs, five million houses—a dream of reality”, was arranged as part of ThinkFest 2019. Construction does create jobs, the economist said, adding, if you read history, the world at certain times, achieved growth through construction sector. “The building of the city of Rome led to creating huge job opportunities and economic activity (in ancient Rome),” he observed.

Talking about relation between construction and industrial sectors, Haque added, the cities were developed first and then came industrialisation and other economic activities.

“We need cities for commerce activities as well. The large shopping malls in the city of Lahore have led to creating jobs. Prime Minister Imran Khan aims to create ten million jobs and he can achieve this goal, if he is able to build five million houses” he said.

However, other speakers were unanimous that the government’s plans of building five million houses and generating 10 million jobs would remain a pipe-dream if it did not bring about drastic improvements in the regulatory framework for ensuring a robust vertical growth in the construction sector. One of the experts said there was a cap on high-rise buildings in most of the metropolitan city like Lahore as one was not allowed to build more than three storeys. “This regulation needs to be changes with a view to kickstarting vertical growth in housing sector,” the speaker said.

The speaker added that land price hike had contributed negatively in making housing expensive. “Especially, housing for low-income people remains low for that very reason,” the expert said. Citing a recent study, the speaker added that top 20 percent of the city dwellers in terms of income own 58 percent of property in the metropolis which was staggering.

“The lowest 20 percent that are larger in population occupy only six percent of the land in the city. It means housing is not being made available to those who actually need it,” the expert viewed. The regulatory framework of housing sector encourages building large houses or owning a piece of land, a speaker viewed.

“It does not support efficient utilisation of land for housing purposes. We are also not properly designing master plan of the city. If you own a piece of land in the heart of city, you will mostly be taxed on covered area,” the speaker said. In this way, the speaker opined, large chunks of lands were lying uncovered in the city centers, and as a result that space remains devoid any economic activity.

“Fairly large homes for instance, in Gulberg, Lahore, in a way are wastage of land. Such large house should be in the vicinity of the city and such land in prime locations of the city needs to be used for vertical housing. Such an arrangement would restrict influx of people living in nearby districts of Lahore who used to come daily in city on their jobs,” the expert added.

These people, according to a study, comprised of about one-third of city population, the expert said and added that their daily commuting happened to be a burden on road network. “Plus these people will save precious time if they are given opportunity of living near their respective workplace,” the speaker said.

Another speaker underlined the need to have localised master planning of city to address peculiar needs of a particular area. “We must include input of masses while devising urban planning. The participatory city development does not exist in the country,” the speaker said.

One of them also floated the idea to develop housing societies in a composite way saying there should be a strict mandatory regulation on developing housing societies where all basic facilities relating to education, health, recreation, commercial etc are available within the perimeter of the locality. “Such urban places will lead to reduce congestion on city roads and encourage a green lively living. Unfortunately, we are witnessing housing societies, where house after house exists but basic amenities don’t, as per requirements and these populous areas are adding to the burden on fragile civic structure of the large cities,” the expert said.