A SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT APPROACH FOR AFFORDABLE HOUSING IN EGYPT

Egypt suffers from a severe shortage in affordable housing. The government's main approach to the problem is to subsidize the affordable housing developments. As the available financial resources are very limited, this approach cannot cope with the size of a growing problem. Recently, the government announced that hundreds of thousands of units are planned. Yet, these - when built - will hardly cover the new demands leaving untouched the accumulated deficits of past decades. This paper propagates a new approach to address the problem. The approach aims to provide sustained developments of affordable housing units without the need for government subsidies. This is to be achieved by making the development of these units a profitable investment for the private sector. The approach is based on viewing the developments of affordable housing units as a development of a community with a variety of needs. These needs create values that allow businesses to make profit. The approach is supported by two supplementary ideas. The first is a decentralized green infrastructure for the development. The second is to make use of the Egyptian culture in term of social responsibility. The paper explains the approach and its supplementary ideas. It also shows the results of a financial study that proves the feasibility of this approach.