Architecture, Building and Planning - Theses
Permanent URI for this collection
Search Results
1 - 1 of 1
-
ItemThe development of group self build housing in Victoria( 1992)This thesis involves the overall development and implementation of the Group Self Build Housing program for the Victorian State Government. It is an enabling strategy to help lower income people to achieve home-ownership by building their own homes. Public housing agencies everywhere, are now faced with the challenge of providing sufficient housing and other associated services to meet the needs of an ever increasing urban population. However, with limited resources, they are increasingly forced to act as "enablers" rather than direct providers. This is most prominent especially in the poorer developing countries where their housing problems are of a different magnitude. Housing agencies and governments have tried for many years to address their housing needs through various "more conventional" means. This was only capable of assisting a fraction of the people. Since then, a large proportion of them have turned to their own resources to house themselves. At times, they seemed capable of achieving this with the most minimal of governmental and social support. Such efforts by people to house themselves, have come to be known as "self help housing". Victoria's housing problems differ in scale from those of the poorer developing countries. Nevertheless, in a land where the national dream is that of "home-ownership", an increasing number of households are finding it more difficult to achieve this dream. Self help housing programs, through the generation of sweat equity can assist such households to acquire their home. The new program developed in this thesis, allows groups of families to work together on the construction of their homes. The effort that they contribute, will help lower the cost of their house and thus make home-ownership more affordable to them. Experience from existing self help housing schemes in Victoria and overseas provided the foundation for the development of this new program. A Victorian prototype program was then developed and tested over a two year period through a two staged pilot program where 52 households were assisted into home-ownership. Five pilot projects, each with between ten to twelve households were successfully completed and the lessons learnt from them were used to implement a mainstream Group Self Build housing program for the State Government. The success of this program was instrumental in increasing efficiencies to self help housing programs operating in Victoria and also offered another option for Victorians to achieve home-ownership..