Towards Lowering the Cost of Houses in Palestine

The main aim of this book is to develop an approach to lower the cost of housing while ensuring adequate environment and health conditions to Palestinian people. This will ultimately enable more people of limited income to own their own houses. The developed approach consists of five phases. These are Strategy, Planning and Design, Procurement, Execution, and Evaluation. The developed approach depends on developing new criteria for the planning and design of low-cost housing projects, developing new construction system (procurement), optimal use of building materials, and proposing suitable financial programs. This approach will lead to create more housing units, introduce suitable area of the housing units, reduce the construction duration and reduce the project overhead. The developed approach can be applied in other countries because the researcher used percentages instead of absolute value for the cost reduction elements. The main recommendation for public and private housing sectors is to use the proposed approach when introducing new low cost housing projects.