Every community has a variety of people. There will always be some people who are wealthy, a large number of middle class professionals and many labourers. It is important that all these categories of wage earners are able to live with dignity and comfort despite the wide disparity in their ability to spend. In the new communities of the UAE this is particularly important, as far too many new developments focus on attracting the wealthy and ignore the middle and low earners.
This is why government support for affordable housing is vital. Dubai did well in a previous generation when Shaikh Rashid’s government built low cost housing in the Karama and Satwa colonies, which meant that people on modest salaries could find good housing that suited their needs. It also had an effect on the rest of the housing market and the supply of affordable housing helped to keep prices lower than they would otherwise have been.
This cannot be managed by ordering developers to build and rent cheap housing units. Companies are here to make money and will not be able to match the social expectations of such a move. It requires the government to either become a landlord itself or work with companies that are tasked to meet its social expectations, for which they would be compensated by the government. Plans to build such social housing should go ahead in the UAE’s variety of communities, as the alternative of commuting for hours between emirates that do not have adequate shared mass transit routes, leads to a vast wastage of time and manpower.
