Abstract:
Housing is an important investment and a fundamental right of every person. The aim of any housing type should be to improve people’s housing opportunities and to ensure equitable access to proper housing, to satisfy the requirements of its occupants and increase their satisfaction. It is essential to understand the factors and drivers that effect the satisfaction of people before designing or implementing any housing policy. Pakistan is going through a rapid growth in the population of its urban centers. People from rural areas are migrating to urban settlements in search of employment and amenities. Due to such a high influx of population the cities are unable to provide adequate housing supply. The capital city of Islamabad has a population of 2 million, with the growth rate of 6%. The continuous growth of the man-made structures and increasing population pose many challenges. The need of the time is to address these challenges and propose a solution to the ever-growing population and housing deficit. The current study assessed the physical characteristics, socio-economic differences and the drivers and barriers that influence residential satisfaction of the residents of single unit houses and apartments in the capital city of Islamabad. 120 single unit houses, 27 private apartments and 20 PHA apartments were sampled in order to determine the residential satisfaction of the city. The approach used to evaluate residential satisfaction in this research is based on Fried and Gleicher’s approach which considers residential quality as the base for evaluating residential satisfaction instead of physical feature of the residence. The dimensions study in this research were Housing attributes, Neighbourhood, Facilities, Maintenance, Culture and Safety. The level of satisfaction of the residents was observed by using the Yeh’s index of satisfaction. Correlation and one-way ANOVA was used to analyze the relationship and variance between the variables of the 3 housing types.
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The residents complained about the sizes of open spaces, privacy issues, noise pollution and problems like absence of recreational spaces. The study showed that the residents of single unit houses were the more satisfied followed by the residents of private apartments, while the residents of PHA apartments were least satisfied.
