Government calls for affordable housing help in Dubai
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Senior Dubai officials have called on the private sector to help the government create more affordable accommodation in the city to address a shortage of low-budget housing.
Dr Aisha bin Bishr, Assistant Director General of the Dubai Executive Office and Director General of the Dubai Smart City Office, said private investment is key to the development of affordable housing projects.
“We cannot do everything alone as a government… We need the investment from the private sector to help provide affordable housing options,” Bishr said.
She was speaking yesterday at the annual United Nations Urban Thinkers Campus in Dubai. The event identified affordable housing as an emerging issue in the Middle East, due to the increasing density of population in urban areas.
However, Bishr did not provide any details on how the government is looking to work with the private sector to increase the amount og affordable housing in Dubai.
Last year Dubai Municipality’s planning and engineering department said that private companies might need to build affordable houses as part of their overall development as the city was suffering from a shortage of affordable housing.
Only one in five homes built in Dubai in 2015 can be considered affordable, according to a report from real estate consultants JLL. Many low and middle-income workers in Dubai need to share overcrowded housing because of a lack of other options.
7DAYS reported how a senior fire civil defence had warned overcrowding put lives at risk as it was a fire hazard.
Meanwhile, Mahmoud Al Burai, CEO of Dubai Real Estate Institution, said that private-public partnership could be one of the solutions.
“There are various solutions we have proposed – we’ve spoken about private-public partnerships, this is something we should have increasingly,” he said.
Frode Mauring, the United Nations Development Programme resident representative to the UAE, said a shortage of affordable housing was a characteristic of any “large and fast-growing” city.
“But by having a large production of new houses and apartments and bringing developments into expanding areas of Dubai brings more balance between demand and supply, and therefore is possible to have prices become more reasonable,” he said.
credit to 7 days UAE