REDUCING THE COST OF INFRASTRUCTURE

December 20, 2016, 1:22 am

≫ Next: Low-Cost Housing and the Shophouse

We would reasonably expect that the amount of roads would be a good proxy for the cost of infrastructure : drains, water mains, sewerage pipes, electrical cables and telephone lines all run along roads – the shorter the road, the lower should be the length of the other services. To test out this out, we undertook to start comparing in detail the cost of water reticulation, sewerage piping, roads and drains in a honeycomb layout against that of a conventional layout.

REAL SITE COMPARISON

We approached Dato Eddie Chen, the CEO of a respected developer (Metro Kajang Bhd) to help us undertake a cost comparison between a rectilinear and honeycomb layout. He was sufficiently intrigued by the ‘honeycomb’ concept to participate in a research project to study the comparative cost of infrastructure of a ‘honeycomb’ layout. A control layout was adopted. This was the layout of a recently completed 60 acre housing scheme in Kajang, Bukit Mewah.

Figure 1

Given that Metro Kajang is a very experienced developer. Obviously, a lot of effort went into revenue out of every single square foot. The layout, as far as rectilinear developments go, is highly efficient. The developer made available to us the full set of layout plans, engineering drawings, Specifications and Bills of Quantities. A “Honeycomb”layout was prepared. We then had an Engineering Consultant, Perunding Metro (no connection with Metro Kajang Bhd.) under the direction of Ir. C.T. Sia, prepare the Sewerage, Water Reticulation and Roads and Drains drawings using the details and specifications adopted in the original design. In this way, a fair ‘apple to apple’ comparison could be undertaken. The quantities of the main items were then measured and the results tabulated for comparison. Edmund Foo, of Quantity Surveyors, JUB Segar then provided realistic rates to apply against the quantities.

RESULTS

After completing the alternative honeycomb layout, a detailed breakdown of the land use was produced. Similarly, the drawing of the existing layout was subject to the same detailed breakdown. The drawings of the original and honeycomb layouts are given in figures 1 above. The detailed land-use breakdown of the two layout designs is shown in table 1.

The main results are shown below (table 2). The Saleable land in the honeycomb option is 23.92 acres compared to 23.21 acres in the original layout, an increase of 3.1%.

Table 2

	SaleableLand (acres)	Road Reserve (acres)	Green (acres)	Amenities (acres)	Units
Original Built Option	23.21	14.42	7.46	8.01	304
Honeycomb	23.92	13.56	7.76	8.01	328
Increase/(decrease)	0.71	(0.86)	0.3	0	24
% Increase/(decrease)	3.1%	(6%)	4%	0%	7.9%

The land to be used as road reserve in the honeycomb option is 13.56 acres compared to 14.42 acres in the original layout, a reduction of 6%. The Green area is increased by 4%, whilst there is no change in the area of the Amenities. The number of units of landed property is increased from 304 to 328 units, up by 7.9%.

WATER RETICULATION SYSTEM

The main cost-centres picked up are 150mm and 200mm UPVC pipes and 150mm and 200mm mild steel (ms) pipes. The mild steel pipes are used where the pipes run below the premixed roads. The layouts of the built and honeycomb alternative options are given in figures 2 and the comparison is shown in table 4. There is an overall reduction in quantities for the honeycomb option; however there are more mild steel pipes.

Figure 2

Table 3

SEWERAGE SYSTEM

The main cost-centers picked up are 225mm and 300mm diameter Vitrified Clay Pipes (VCP) pipes and manholes. The layouts of the built and honeycomb alternative options are given in figures 3 (next pages) and the comparison is shown in table 5. There is an overall reduction in quantities for the honeycomb option. There is a 15% saving in the length of 225mm VCP pipes, a 37% reduction in 300mm diameter pipes and a 23% reduction in the number of manholes.

Figure 3

Table 4

DRAINS

The main cost-centres picked up are drains and culverts. The drains are 0.6m wide, 0.9m wide and 1.2m wide. The culverts are 1.2mX 0.6m, 1.2X 0.9m and 1.8mX 1.2m. The layouts of the built and honeycomb alternative options are given in figures 4 (next few pages) and the comparison is shown in table 6. There is an overall reduction in quantities for the honeycomb option. There is a 10% saving in the length of 0.6m wide drains, a 57% increase in the 0.9m wide drains and a 58% reduction in the 1.2m wide drains. In addition, the length of the culverts were reduced – for the 1.2mX 0.6m, 25%; 1.2X 0.9m ,2%; and 1.8mX 1.2m, 31%.

ROADS

The total area of the premixed road surface for both options were measured as follows – 28,799sm for the original option and 26,668sm for the honeycomb option. Refer to figures 5 and table 7 again. The honeycomb option saved 2,131sm of road surface.

Figure 4

Table 5

OVERALL COST COMPARISON

We found that the honeycomb layout produced lower cost figures for all the works compared with the conventional design (table 6 and 7).

For the Water Reticulation works, there is an overall reduction in quantities for the honeycomb option, however there are more mild steel pipes. Since the mild steel pipes are more expensive, overall, the cost of the honeycomb project is only cheaper by RM2508. I.e. only a 1% reduction in cost.

For the Sewerage works, there is an overall reduction in quantities for the honeycomb option. There is a 15% saving in the length of 225mm VCP pipes, a 37% reduction in 300mm diameter pipes and a 23% reduction in the number of manholes. Overall, the cost of the honeycomb proposal is cheaper by a substantial amount - RM126,941, i.e. a 19% reduction in cost .

For the Drainage works, there is a 10% saving in the length of 0.6m wide drains, a 57% increase in the 0.9m wide drains and a 58% reduction in the 1.2m wide drains. In addition, the length of the culverts were reduced – for the 1.2mX 0.6m, by 25%; 1.2X 0.9m ,by 2%; and 1.8mX 1.2m, 31%. Overall, the cost of the honeycomb project is cheaper by a substantial amount – RM181,500, i.e. a 13% reduction in cost .

For the Road works, the honeycomb option saved 2,131sm of road surface. The cost of the honeycomb proposal is cheaper by a substantial amount – RM102,301, i.e. a 7.4% reduction in cost.

The cost of the original design was RM3,688,618 compared to the honeycomb design, RM3,275,368. The honeycomb proposal turned out to be RM413,250 cheaper, a substantial 11% saving. However, there are more units in the honeycomb version – 328 instead of 304. This is an increase of 7.9%. Taken on per-unit basis, the savings in water reticulation, sewerage, roads and drains are as follows:

Table 7

	Total Cost (RM)	No of Units	Cost per unit (RM)
Original Built Option	3,688,618	304	12,133.12
Honeycomb	3,275,368	328	9,985.88

Table 6

DISCUSSION

It is interesting to note that the savings in the total area of road reserve is quite small. This amount is certainly less than that of the examples given earlier. I believe the reasons for this are as follows:

1 There are more units resulting in a higher density. These extra units bring down the area of road reserve per unit, and seen in this perspective, the reduction in roads becomes higher.

2 Only about a third of the layout is taken up by terrace houses. As shown earlier in the comparison between 3 and 8 units of detached units in a rectilinear layout versus the ‘honeycomb’ layout, there is a reduction in the amount of savings in roads. This is due to the absence of back-lanes in detached housing. In addition, the rectilinear layout of the detached lots employed a lot of cul-de-sacs which are land-use efficient.

3 The land designated for ‘future development’ was obviously shaped to take on continuing rows of terrace houses. A ‘honeycomb layout’ would have sliced out a different shape. As it is, the layout of ‘honeycomb’ houses at the periphery of the land for ‘future development’ became rather inefficient.

Given the small saving in road reserve area, the results become all the more remarkable. The roads pavement area itself saw a reduction of 7%. Quite substantial reductions were found for the cost of drains and culverts, sewerage pipes and manholes, and water mains.

Applying realistic rates to the outline bill of quantities, we found that the overall savings in the cost of the infrastructural services to be approximately RM413,250 or 11%, and the per-unit savings to be 17%.

Another factor to consider is the extra saleable land made available in the honeycomb layout. The extra land that can be sold is 0.71 acres or 30928 sf. If we price this land at RM50 per sf, the extra sale value unlocked will be RM 1,546,380.

CONCLUSION

From the studies undertaken above, we have found that the adoption of the ‘honeycomb’ layout has brought about clear improvements in land-use efficiency through a reduction in the area of roads. In the example, the reduction in the amount of roads, bring with it clear savings in the cost of roads, drains, water reticulation and sewerage lines. This example is, of course, based on a specific built project, and we cannot conclude that the employment of the ‘honeycomb’ layout will always give better results compared to rectilinear layouts. However, it has been shown that even in a case where the savings in amount of land used for road reserve is quite small, there is still substantial savings to be made in the infrastructure.

The reduction in roads brought about an increase in the saleable area. In this case study, the increase in saleable area is marginal, i.e. 3%. However the estimated contribution to the bottom line is a hefty RM 1.5 million, almost four times the estimated savings from infrastructure.

Certainly, the honeycomb technique has been shown to have its inherent advantages, and for developers tired of looking at rectilinear proposals, an honeycomb concept now presents a cost saving alternative. More than that, the benefits to be made from increasing sales revenue through having more land to sell, can be substantial.

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Low-Cost Housing and the Shophouse

December 24, 2016, 5:52 am

≫ Next: The "Kotapuri" - Placing Low-Cost Housing above Shops

≪ Previous: REDUCING THE COST OF INFRASTRUCTURE

In Malaysia developers were required to set aside 30% of the houses they build to be low cost houses. Implemented and amended to varying degrees by State and Federal Governments through the years, it has been clear for some time that there were serious problems with this policy.

At the turn of the century the ceiling price of low cost houses had greatly exceeded the cost of constructing them. Developers placed the low cost housing in the most undesirable locations in their site, and spent as little as they could to minimize their losses. But the resulting low quality of the houses made them unpopular.

By 2005 nearly 3000 completed houses in the low cost category were unsold. In many instances the vacant properties became dilapidated and had forced sale value of the low cost houses were a fraction of the original selling price.

It appears that developers were being forced by government policy to build houses for poor people who did not want them.

To make things worse, the low-cost housing policy had the unintended but nasty side effect of discouraging developers from building houses that people with middle income could afford. With every seven houses having to subsidize three low cost units, there was much more money in high end houses to bear the tax burden compared to middle cost ones. This was in effect a very regressive tax on house buyers. Developers responded by building more high end units and fewer medium costs ones.

More recently the federal government finally introduce a separate “Affordable Housing” initiative, but many of the negative elements of the low cost housing policy still remain because State Governments have the ultimate say in land matters.

Whilst the low cost housing policy was in effect, trying to get developers interested in Honeycomb housing in the medium cost segment was extremely hard, but these ideas now are easier to apply to affordable housing than low-cost.

The level of requirement for low-cost housing is now much lower. Instead of a blanket 30% requirement, the policy is now much more nuanced, some areas require 20%, others only 5%, and still other areas where there is no requirement at all.

Still, the it is argued that the poor should still be given opportunities for home-ownership.

For a possible solution to this problem we looked towards another building type that is very common in Malaysia – the shophouse.

According to Wikipedia(2007) the term ‘shophouse’ is an architectural building type that is both native and unique to urban Southeast Asia. This hybrid building form characterises the historical centres of most towns and cities in the region. Shophouses typically display the following features.

Mutifunctional, combining residential and commercial use. The ground floor of shophouses were used for business and trading, and the proprietors lived on the upper floor.
Low-rise, typically two to three storeys high.
Terraced urban buildings, standing next to each other along a street, with no gap or space in between buildings, with a single party wall separating the shophouses on either side of it.
Narrow street frontages, but may extend backwards to great depths, extending all the way to the rear street.

Historian, Jon S.H. Lim, adds another important feature, and that is the ’five-foot ways’, and he traces this to the Raffles ‘Ordinances’ (1822) which stipulated “ all houses constructed of brick or tiles have a common type of front each having a verandah of a certain depth,open to all sides as a continuous and open passage on each side of the street”.

This building type evolved according to changing needs from the late 18th century during the colonial era, into the post-independence era, until today. Shophouses inhabited by a single proprietor and his extended family, became tenanted buildings; double storey became three storey and higher; the upper floors gained direct staircase access from the ground floor verandah; the single proprietor building became a subdivided building with separate strata title ownership. The traditional shophouse building evolved to create new categories: the shop-apartment and the shop-office.

Of the two, the shop-office have become more common than the shop-apartment. This is unsurprising as apartments above shops are unattractive for families to stay in. There is a lack of green space and amenities for children and the street below is not safe for children.

However, offices on the upper floors is only suited to main town or city centres. The upper floors of shop houses in many suburbs and the country side are usually under-utilized.

If the design of shop-houses can be improved to make it more acceptable for families, then the upper floors can be a very suitable location to place low-cost housing.

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The "Kotapuri" - Placing Low-Cost Housing above Shops

December 26, 2016, 7:47 pm

≫ Next: Point-Block Low-Rise Low-Cost Apartments

≪ Previous: Low-Cost Housing and the Shophouse

The “Kotapuri” apartment is a new alternative to the shophouse building type. It was designed to overcome the functional conflict between residential housing (especially for the low-income category) and commercial use. In particular it seeks to solve the following problems found in existing shophouse and low-cost schemes.

THE PROBLEM WITH LIVING IN SHOPHOUSES

The commercial zone is not an obvious place to place housing. There are bound to be conflicts between residential and commercial use. The shophouse building-type evolved from an earlier period when merchants lived above their shops. The towns, at that time, were small and could be said to be have been safer than they are today. There was less traffic and, perhaps, not so many strangers. For the typical family today, the typical shop/apartment layout is hardly ideal. The shortcomings include:

Lack of suitable play area for pre-school and primary school children
Safety from traffic
Lack of soft landscape
Safety from crime
Lack of cleanliness
Inadequate system for disposal of solid waste
Insufficient car park

Yet, having housing near shops, does have advantages. Shop/apartment developments almost always ‘boom’ before shop/office schemes. That is, the shops below apartments start to become occupied, and commercial activities begin to thrive, much earlier. In projects where there are shop apartments and shop/offices, the apartments get fully occupied before the shops. In turn, the shops get occupied before the offices. This reflects the differing nature of demand for commercial and residential products. Households are quite indifferent to a new location, at least when compared to shops. Retail and other commercial activities need a population to cater to. The residents living above the shops contribute to this population. Offices come later because they look for a ready infrastructure of services - places to eat, to buy essential things and services that they need in the course of their business. They also want a good already well-known address. They certainly prefer not to move to a new, half-deserted area. Proximity to a labour pool and good housing also helps.

PROBLEMS WITH LOW COST HOUSING

In addition to the above, existing low-cost apartment designs are also beset by problems that the “Kotapuri” seeks to overcome:

Isolated location far away from shops and amenities.

Difficulty of collecting maintenance fees
Insufficient money for proper maintenance
A loss-making proposition that needs to be cross subsidized by medium and high cost housing.
No appreciation in value for buyers

The ground floor of the shop house is the most valuable part of the shop. The upper floors are less valuable, especially if like most shop houses, there are no lifts provided. The typical rental of a 3 storey shop house in the suburbs of Kuala Lumpur is RM4,,000 for the ground floor shop house, RM2,000 for the first floor and only RM1,000 for the third floor.

In many less popular suburbs and towns, there is no demand for offices or apartments above them. In these places, developers often build single storey shop houses. Where two or three storey shop houses have been built, the upper floors are hard to rent out. In many instances, they become derelict from disuse.

So the problem for shop houses is the lack of demand for upper floors. The suggestion is that the upper floors can be put to good use by placing low cost and low medium cost housing on them.

THE KOTAPURI….AN URBAN CASTLE

The ‘Kotapuri’ concept seeks to create a synergy between shops and low cost housing. If the functional conflicts between residential and commercial uses can be overcome, there are mutual advantages to be gained. The location of low-cost housing is moved from the furthest corner of the development land o the part nearest to main roads leading into it, and thus closer to town services, amenities, public transport and job opportunities. The shops gain from having a captive population, helping to keep the area busy and thriving throughout the day and evenings.

Using the Honeycomb concept as a starting point, we have designed a building that provides effective segregation between shops below and houses above. We do this by creating a building with shops around a courtyard. The shops in this case are small, only 720sf in size but with a full 20’ frontage in the front and a 7’ backyard.

Access to the communal courtyard, landscaped with trees, plants and play equipment, is limited to residents only. This courtyard is raised – about four feet higher than the floor level of the shop backyard, and then has another 4’ of low wall to effectively screen the shops from the courtyard.

At each corner is a staircase that leads to the apartments above. On the each floor is a lobby area that not only provides access (to four or six) apartments, but also as a communal space. The apartments can range from over 700sf to 900sf, covering the prescribed sizes for Low-Cost to Medium Cost flats, the smaller apartments placed above the larger ones.

On three corners are placed Offices that have their own staircase access from the ground floor. On one corner is a Community Centre that can function as a kindergarten, community hall, management office, etc.

In concept, the proposed design is like a castle. High walls surround an inner courtyard, and protect its inhabitants from the dangers outside. The staircase wells at each corner rise above the walls like towers.

CREATING A SENSE OF COMMUNITY

The Kotapuri design attempts to encourage a sense of community by clustering units together around communal facilities: 4 or 6 units on each floor share a lobby which doubles as a play area for small children; 16 units share a staircase and entrance; in one block are 64 units which share an 3600sf outdoor communal area (which is the courtyard in the middle of the block), and a 1500 sf indoor community centre.

In this example, it there are only about 300 persons in the block, a small enough number of people to remember by face. The residents recognize their neighbours, perhaps more importantly, they can pick out strangers!

In this arrangement, the residents can organize each other easily. Each lobby (comprising 4 or 6 units) can choose one representative to sit in a committee of 12. An organized group with a sense of community is very helpful in promoting public spirit and cooperation in keeping the premises safe, clean and well maintained.

PROVIDING FOR CHILDREN’S OUTDOOR PLAY

The semi-private courtyard is sheltered from the busy streets outside the Kotapuri. Access into it will be regulated (see below). The raised and landscaped courtyard area (only about 3600sf) is seperated from the enclosing walls by the 7’ width of the sunken shop backyards. In addition there is a low 4’ wall at the edge of the courtyard; together with the retaining wall, this makes for an 8’ screen that acts as a buffer between the shops and the apartments.

This courtyard space, safe from traffic and strangers, can serve as an area suitable for primary school age children to play without supervision from their parents.

The lobbies at each floor is also where younger children from pre-school age can play, perhaps with the parents nearby in their homes, keeping a collective eye on them. The lobby is actually the size of along corridor. However, the corridor, being so narrow, can only be used for circulation.

Space that is made ideal for children is also suitable for the old and handicapped. Providing a communal space just outside their homes can ameliorate the sense of isolation these people often feel, trapped in their homes when there is no suitable outdoor area for them to socialize.

↧

Point-Block Low-Rise Low-Cost Apartments

December 28, 2016, 5:09 pm

≫ Next: HOW CAN HONEYCOMB HOUSING MAKE HOUSING MORE AFFORDABLE?

≪ Previous: The "Kotapuri" - Placing Low-Cost Housing above Shops

Apart from the shop-house, the other building-type that I had developed as a solution to low-cost housing was the 5-storey walk-up flat.

Most walk-up apartments in Malaysia can be described as slab blocks. In a paper written in 2000 I argued that the point block low rise apartment is not only more aesthetically pleasing and socially functional, it is also an economically viable alternative.

In the previous six years, I had attempted to design low cost and low-medium cost housing that met the strict cost limits required by developers, the rules set by government authorities, and the same time achieve the aesthetic and social aims of my practice.

My firm approached this problem by designing and refining generic designs capable of being applied across the various sites, requirements and parameters of different projects. We promoted the point-block low-rise apartment as a generic design which is superior to the ubiquitous slab block low rise apartment.

THE ECONOMIC ADVANTAGES OF POINT BLOCK LOW RISE APARTMENT COMPARED TO THE SLAB BLOCK LOW RISE APARTMENT

The slab block low-rise walk-up apartment is the standard solution in big towns and cities in Malaysia. The typical design comprises four or five storeys of apartments strung out in two lines opposite each other with access corridors and voids in the middle, and staircases at both ends of the corridor

There are of course many variations to this basic concept. We just must adapt specific dimensions and layout to customize the design. The slab block, in my opinion is not very pleasing aesthetically, and in social terms, now too positive either. Its main advantage is that it is cheap. Certainly, it is cheap compared to terrace houses or bungalows because it use less land. Typically, 50 to 60 units per acre compared to 20 units / acre for terrace house and even less tor bungalows. The construction cost for unit is also low compared to the bungalow or terrace house because there are lots of shared walls, shared structure, floors and roofing.

Against to the point-block, the slab block certainly looks cheaper. And therefore, it is cheaper goes the implicit common-sense logic. I challenged that common-sense conclusion.

The point block walk-up apartment comprises a single staircase in the core and four or more units around that central staircase. Every unit is a corner unit. The point blocks that we’ve designed certainly do not look cheap but there are specific and verifiable reasons why point blocks are cost-effective:

DENSITY (UNITS/ACRE)

Land is an important cost factor in housing. Commonly it is 10% - 20% of the total development cost of a mixed housing project. The accepted density for low-cost low rise apartments (in most States in Malaysia) is 60 units per acre. It is not easy to achieve this density in an aesthetically pleasing and socially acceptable manner. You can maximise units for any given plot of land by using bigger blocks. Right? Well, not always true.

It you have two similar round vessels of say 1 cubic meter capacity each and fill one vessel with large stones and the other vessel with small pebbles which vessel would contain more material? The vessel with the small pebbles will have more material. There would be less spaces between the pebbles compared with the bigger stones. In a similar manner, small blocks can fill up a site better than standard slab blocks. This tends to be true for big sites, especially sites with irregular shape. In the case of small sites, blocks designed to the shape of the land do better.

SPACE EFFICIENCY (NET SELLABLE AREA / GROSS AREA)

Small point blocks are more efficient compared to slab blocks. In particular, the corridor is eliminated and the staircase and landing area is minimal. It is usual for point blocks to have 60% or less of corridor and staircase space per unit. It is not in typical for slab block with double loading corridors'# to have 76sf (7sm) external circulation space per unit. Slab block with single loading corridors can have external circulation space 96sf (9sm) or more per unit. Architects sometimes think that the more units share staircases, the more cost effective the design, but the corridors that lead to the staircases also add cost.

INTERNAL LAYOUT EFFICIENCY

This is about maximising space usage in units. In the point-block generic design, every unit is a corner unit. There is a cost penalty tor this - there is less shared walls between units and there is less shared beams and columns. However, there is a benefit - less shared walls means more external walls, and with more external walls for light and ventilation it is easier to design efficient and functional rooms. In our point block designs, we try to maximise usable space and minimise circulation space. In intermediate units of slab blocks, external wall is at a premium. Voids have to be cut out in the interior of the block to provide windows to receive what little light and ventilation these air wells can provide. Or else, the exterior elevations require deep recesses to bring in light and ventilation to the middle areas.

The depth of the units, often long in relation to the width, results in long circulation spaces required to access the outer rooms. This layout also involves other substantial compromises in functional design. Firstly, entrances are invariably at the dining area near the kitchen. This is not functional but seems to be the accepted standard even for medium to high cost apartments. Secondly, there will be some bedrooms, the kitchen, drying yard and some toilets which will have to make do with light and ventilation from air wells. Thirdly, entering the apartment from where the kitchen and drying yard is situated creates the impression of entering a home from its backyard. Fourthly, bedrooms are difficult to cluster together in a private zone separate from the semi-private living and dining areas.

Blocks with small footprints require small earth platforms. Blocks with big footprints require larger earth, platforms. A series of small earth platforms generally involve less volume then a series of larger platforms cut out from the same original slope profile. From the same illustration, it is also intuitively clear that easier to arrange point blocks to sit on cut ground than it is to arrange slab blocks to meet this same requirement. Having original ground to sit on rather than fill ground can save a lot in foundation costs. Of course, slab blocks can be arranged along contours to minimise earthworks, though this limits the flexibility of the layout and is not effective where the land slope in two directions. Another possibility is to stagger the slab block down the slope, this requires retaining walls or stilts which again adds cost, and reduces standardisation.

Therefore, it can be said that generally point blocks with smaller footprints than slab blocks provide greater flexibility in external layout design, requiring less earthworks and lower foundation costs.

CONCLUSION

Most low-cost flats in Malaysia can be described as slab block low-rise apartments. The ubiquity of this generic design, despite its functional and social inadequacies can be attributed to the misconception that, given the cost constraints there are no alternatives. But Low-rise point blocks in my opinion through more aesthetically pleasing, functional and socially acceptable can be more cost effective when compared to the slab block.

COMMERCIALIZATION

Back in 1995, not long after I set up my firm, I decided to focus on designing low-cost housing. We did not have any clients yet, but I made a bet that the demand for such housing would always be present, and if the designs we came up with were good, then commissions would come. The bet came good: in the following years, the government embarked on a programme to get the public and private sector to build for the low-income.

The government entrusted a government owned corporation, TPPT Sdn Bhd, to work with the private sector and State governments to build low-cost housing. The mood of the times is reflected in the book produced by a think-thank which was closely allied to the government: "Low-Cost Housing - A Definitive Study". The problem of housing for the low income was going to be solved!

This provided an opportunity for Arkitek M Ghazali to introduce our ideas for "point blocks": ie 5 storey walk-up blocks with only 4 or 8 units to each floor accessible from a single staircase . We found that point blocks were economical: the ratio of saleable area to total area we were able to get was more than 95% , compared to about 85% achieved by the conventional slab blocks which could have up to 16 units per floor accessed from a central corridor.

These point blocks were arranged in a hexagonal formation (the first hint of honeycomb housing). In terms of land-use efficiency, we found this to be as efficient as the conventional rectilinear layout. In addition, the point block concept created "defensible spaces" and I instinctively felt that the clustering of the flats offered a much more community-friendly environment.

The recession of 1997/98 put a stop to the would be boom in low-cost housing.

However, the firm was able to see quite a few of its ideas come to fruition:

Octagonal low-cost 5 storey point-block flats, eight units on each floor, laid out in a hexagonal grid in Nusajaya, Johor below:

Medium-cost students 5 storey point-block apartments, four units to each floor, laid out in a hexagonal grid in Universiti Industri Selangor, Batang Berjuntai, Selangor.

This 5-storey walk-up building concept could easily be married to the Honeycomb apartment idea...

↧

HOW CAN HONEYCOMB HOUSING MAKE HOUSING MORE AFFORDABLE?

January 4, 2017, 7:16 pm

≫ Next: Developing more Cluster Townhouse Designs

≪ Previous: Point-Block Low-Rise Low-Cost Apartments

In this last part of the book, we will look at specific designs that can address the problems of delivering low-cost, low-medium cost and affordable housing that almost all Malaysians can afford to own a house.

HOUSING AFFORDABILITY IN MALAYSIA

Housing affordability is commonly expressed as Price-Income Ratio (PIR), defined as median home price to median household income. International Demographia rates affordability as follows:

Rating	Median Multiple
Severely Unaffordable	≥ 5.1
Seriously Unaffordable	4.1 – 5.0
Moderately Unaffordable	3.1 – 4.0
Affordable	≤ 3.0

This is the median household income in Malaysia in 2014 by state.

So, for example, the median monthly income in Kelantan is RM2716 in Kelantan, in Perak, RM3451, in Melaka is RM5029, in Selangor, RM6,214, in Kuala Lumpur, RM7,620. Affordability at 3 times annual income In Kelantan it is about RM98,000; in Perak RM125,000; in Melaka RM184,000; in Selangor RM224,000; in Kuala Lumpur RM274,00

The question is: what sort of housing can be developed that is within these affordability limits. The usual approach to this question is to look at conventional types of houses like terrace houses, low-rise and high-rise and to see how the construction cost of these housing units can be minimized for each type of housing. However, I believe that making housing more affordable is not all about price: quality can play a major role in reducing cost.

Let me explain.

QUALITY AND AFFORDABLE HOUSING

Malaysians moved from kampongs to terrace houses when they migrated to towns: land in towns was too costly to allow people to build detached houses on their own piece of land. And when terrace houses become too expensive, they moved to low-rise walk-up flats, or if they could afford it, high-rise apartments. For many, living on the ground, on landed property, remains their dream. If they must give up this dream, it is with reluctance.

Looking at our southern neighbour, Singapore, moving people from kampongs or overcrowded shop-houses with over 100 persons living above a single shop, to modern high-rise flats was not easy.

Lee Kuan Yew wrote “There were enormous problems when we resettled farmers and others from almost rent-free wooden squatter huts with no water, power or modern sanitation, and therefore no utility bills, into high-rise dwellings with all these amenities but also a monthly bill to pay. It was a wrenching experience…”

“Several pig farmers couldn’t bear to part with their pigs and reared them in their high-rise flats…a couple with 12 children …brought a dozen rear chickens and ducks to at the kitchen…”

“For a long while many…walked up the stairs because they were afraid of lifts. There were people who continued to use kerosene lamps instead of electric bulbs.”

Malaysia’s experience was much more sanguine: the first big move was from kampong houses or squatter huts to terrace houses. The move was looked at as a step up – a desirable upgrade. However, as landed property becomes unaffordable, a move to apartments is seen as a step down.

Dato’ Alan Tong, pioneer of condominiums in Malaysia, has recounted how he had to add more and more facilities to his first condo – OG Heights – to attract buyers who were more used to landed property. Of course, as people got used to high-rise living, they learned to appreciate its advantages and adapted to the disadvantages. So now, condos in Malaysia can fetch prices as high as that of landed property. And in Singapore, the majority are happy and are proud of their HDB apartments.

SUBSTANTIALLY REDUCING THE COST OF HOUSING

The cost of land and construction are the two main components that determine housing price and affordability. In looking for solutions to reducing costs, many have looked to see how construction costs can be reduced and have recommended the development of efficient and standard designs so that housing can be mass produced. The adoption of industrialized building systems is also recommended to make the production of houses more factory production.

However, there are at least two limitations with this cost saving approach: the first is that the benefits of IBS and mass production is best achieved when there is a high degree of repetition. Housing demand on the other hand, like most consumer products, favours variety. So, designing standard plans so that whole neighbourhoods comprise only a house-type to maximize repetition is catering for the convenience of the builder, not the interest of the buyer.

The second problem is that the savings in construction cost to be gained from mass production is limited. From the practical experience of many, including mine, it is possible to save money from the adoption of IBS, but the effect is just not large enough.

IBS is about the process of building and mainly relates to assembling the main structural elements. However, the structure and fabric of the house makes up just one portion of the cost of housing. Services and infrastructural also make up a substantial amount. Still another factor to consider in trying to substantially reduce is the cost of land other costs related to it.

Adopting IBS might speed up construction, reduce waste and result in better quality finishes, but realistically, the possible savings expressed as a percentage of total construction cost reduce is only about 5%.

It is also possible to consider the price of land as artificial and to reduce it by releasing government land at a subsidized rate or resort to compulsory land acquisition at below market price, but those actions are beyond the scope of this book.

The technical alternative to the high price of land is to introduce more intensive types of housing with higher density, so that the cost of each acre of land can be shared among more units. The advantage of this approach is that not only is there a saving in land cost but higher density housing can also mean lower infrastructure cost and building cost. To illustrate this point let’s look at a typical piece of suburban land that costs RM25 per square foot and the ball park figures for the cost of building and infrastructure.

Table 1: Typical costs of Land, Building and Infrastructure where land is RM25 per square foot.

	Density	Plot ratio	Land cost RMpsf	Building Cost RMpsf	Infra Cost RMpsf	Sub-total RM	% cheaper than Terrace House
Single-storey Terrace houses	14	0.37	68	100	20	188
Cluster Townhouse	20	0.46	54	90	17	161	14%
5 storey apartment	55	1.26	20	80	15	115	39%

Here I’ve listed the cost of land, building and infrastructure of a range of alternative affordable products – terrace house, cluster townhouse and 5-storey shop-apartment - all with 1000sf net sellable floor area (NFA). There are large cost savings for land. There are also big cost differences between constructing a terrace house and a townhouse or a five-storey apartment or a shop-house! And then there are cost savings that accrue from reductions in infrastructural costs.

The reason for the savings in land cost is very simple – more units share the cost of each acre of land. Having more units packed into each acre also reduces infrastructure cost as the same or lower amount of road, drains, pipes and sewers serve more units. The terrace townhouse in which the ground floor and the first floor belong to different owners share more common walls, floors and roofs compared with the terrace house. In the apartment, there is an even higher percentage of common walls, floors and roofs.

Naturally, given a free choice and not taking price into consideration, people will choose the terrace house over the 5-storey apartment. As they would naturally prefer a bungalow to a terrace houses.

The challenge is to make the alternatives that are cheaper to build turn out to be as attractive as the terrace house so that house-buyers do not see them as a downgrade. It is here where Honeycomb housing can play a major role.

Our aim is that the less expensive Honeycomb alternatives might even be considered as an upgrade to the terrace house.

In the following chapters, there is a common theme. We look at a series of conventional house-types – from townhouses, shop-houses to five storey flats – and propose a new Honeycomb adaptation that makes them more attractive and desirable. Mainly, by providing homes with a private and shared garden, we make the homes as similar as possible to terrace houses.

In the next chapter, we look at Townhouses. This house-type, is one step down from terrace houses. In the conventional form, two-storey 24”x80” houses are divide into two – one unt upstairs and another one downstairs.

Following this, 5-storey walk-up flats. As building low-cost terrace houses became too expensive, developers looked to this house-type. If Alan Tong and the HDB provide the examples of how quality was successfully achieved in what were new forms of housing, the experience of low-cost walk-up apartments demonstrates the what happens when quality is lacking. We propose how to improve the quality of these apartments by adopting the Honeycomb idea.

In the chapter 19, we look at how the Shop-house can be adapted to answer the problem of the most difficult segment of the affordable home market: low-cost housing.

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Developing more Cluster Townhouse Designs

January 6, 2017, 5:17 pm

≫ Next: Low-Cost 5-storey Low Cost Flats

≪ Previous: HOW CAN HONEYCOMB HOUSING MAKE HOUSING MORE AFFORDABLE?

PR1MA PENGKALAN, ALOR GAJAH

The clients were so happy with the response to the Townhouses that they then changed their plans for the next phase of 50 acres to a proposal for all Townhouses.

My firm had earlier prepared a mix income layout for this site, where Townhouses are mixed with other house-types in each cul-de-sac. It was, I thought, an ambitious proposal which challenged the conventional practice of having segregating bungalows, semi-detached houses, large terrace houses and smaller terrace houses each in their own neighbourhood. The local authority had also requested that each open green spaces or “kawasan lapang” should be at least 10,000sf. So, in this layout we complied.

However, at that time the Government, through PR1MA, was promoting affordable housing to be sold at 20% below market price. Our client decided to respond to this call, and to take the best advantage of a modular formwork system, wanted instead a Honeycomb layout with only one type of Townhouse design. The developer was also able to sell the idea to PR1MA. A layout was prepared by a Town-planner based in Melaka who designed a simpler, very efficient, kind of a Honeycomb layout. Here the Townhouse blocks are all arranged in rows along streets which have a 10” green strip in front of every home.

This fast-track project for 1160 Townhouses was planned to be completed in just 18 months and is in now under construction.

JASIN, MELAKA

The next project in Melaka at Jasin provided a better opportunity to improve on the Townhouse design. Here, the Townhouses, priced from RM150,000 to RM180.000, are in semi-detached blocks rather than quadruplex ones. This allows the rear wall to be an external rather than a party wall allowing a better arrangement of rooms.

Still, up to this stage, there was no opportunity yet for a cul-de-sac Honeycomb layout.

A TOWNHOUSE HONEYCOMB LAYOUT

Is it possible to design a Honeycomb cul-de-sac layout with Townhouses that can compete with the linear layout produced at Alor Gajah? Below is a possible alternative where a combination of semi-detached and cluster Townhouses is able to produce a similar density to that achieved in Alor Gajah.

	Units	ac	%ac
Total Residential	600	15.76	59.1%
Surau & kindergarten		0.43	1.6%
Pocket Parks		1.84	6.9%
Central Green		0.82	3.1%
Road		7.8	29.3%
Total Amenities
Density	21.6
Total land		27.84

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Low-Cost 5-storey Low Cost Flats

January 8, 2017, 8:15 am

≫ Next: From 5-storey Point Blocks to Honeycomb 5-storey V-Saped Apartments

≪ Previous: Developing more Cluster Townhouse Designs

Since the 1980’s, Malaysia developers were required to set aside 30% of the houses they build to be low cost houses priced below RM25,000. Implemented and amended to varying degrees by State and Federal Governments through the years, it has been clear for some time that there were serious problems with this policy.

By the 1990’s. it became clear that the housing that came out from the current low-cost policy was not satisfactory. The construction cost of a low-cost house that met the minimum requirements was more than the selling price. Developers had to subsidize the low-cost housing; not surprisingly, developers designed and built them to minimum standards.

But of course, any subsidy wasn’t really from the developers’ own pockets: they passed it on to ordinary house purchasers. Developers found that the sales from seven medium-cost house could not sufficiently subsidize 3 low-cost homes; better to build 7 high-end houses. In effect the low-cost housing requirement became a disincentive to building medium cost houses. It was also a heavy tax on purchasers, and a very regressive one to boot.

So, the rules were tweaked. For example, in Johor for instance, the new requirement became:

20% low-cost RM25,000
10% low-medium type 1 RM60,00
10% low-medium type 2 RM80,000

In the latter part of the 1990’s the federal government also introduced a raft of other new measures to boost the building housing for the poor: it offered soft loans to developers of low cost housing; a revolving fund was set up to finance construction. The standard of the low-cost houses was set at improved levels, notably the requirement for 3 bedrooms.

The government entrusted government linked companies to work with the private sector and State governments to build low-cost housing. The mood of the times is reflected in the book produced by a think-thank which was closely allied to the government: "Housing the Nation - A Definitive Study". The problem of housing for the low income was going to be solved!

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN QUALITY IS NEGLECTED?

However, because the ceiling price of low-cost houses had greatly exceeded the cost of constructing them, developers placed the low-cost housing in the most undesirable locations in their site, and spent as little as they could to minimize their losses. But the resulting low quality of the houses made them unpopular.

The low-cost housing was almost always segregated in the worst location of any development, away from shops, amenities and public transport. The house-type of choice was the 5 storey walk-up flat, about 60 units per acre, some with the ground floor empty, with only about one car parking space for every two units.

They have almost all turned out to be crowded and all badly maintained. Many of the new housing schemes that resulted looked likely to become slums.

It was expected that the low-income people would grab the chance at home ownership! But this was not the reception that was given. In the states of Johor and Selangor where there is the problem of property overhang, unsold low-cost houses made up the main component in the number of unsold completed properties.In many instances the vacant properties became dilapidated and the “forced sale value” of the low-cost houses were a fraction of the original selling price. In many cases where the banks took over and tried to auction off the properties, there were few takers and reserve prices drifted lower to ridiculous levels.

In 2005 nearly 3000 completed houses in the low-cost category were unsold. It appears that developers were being forced by government policy to build houses for poor people who did not want them.

This situation was absurd! Developers make a loss from building low-cost houses even when they are able to sell all of them - when they remain unsold, their cashflow and profitability became seriously compromised.

Whilst the middle class buy houses that appreciate in value, the buyers of many low-cost flats, especially those out of town, have seen the value of their homes dwindle.

It was during the mid-1990’s that I first started thinking about building types and how to improve them, not in response to any one project but to develop a new generic solution that could be adapted to a range of sites. Most walk-up apartments in Malaysia can be described as slab blocks and it was to this specific building type that I developed an alternative.
In a paper written in 2000 I argued that the point block low-rise apartment is not only more aesthetically pleasing and socially functional, it is also an economically viable alternative.

In the next post I will touch on the point-block low-rise low-cost apartments.

Developers responded by simply by building more high end units and fewer medium costs ones.

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From 5-storey Point Blocks to Honeycomb 5-storey V-Saped Apartments

January 10, 2017, 2:46 pm

≫ Next: A 5-Storey High-Density Honeycomb Apartment

≪ Previous: Low-Cost 5-storey Low Cost Flats

The first low -cost houses in Malaysia were single storey terrace houses. As land became more expensive, developers built double storey terrace houses which could fit in more units per acre. They made savings in infrastructure costs too. But the cost of building only increased slightly. The savings in the cost of land and infrastructure compensated for any increase in the cost of building.

As urban land prices increased further, developers started building 5-storey walk-up flats. Developers discovered that this building type was cheap to build. Because there are many shared walls, floors and roofs, the construction cost per square foot is lower than terrace houses. They compensated for the need to construct common areas like staircases and corridors that increased the gross area of the building over and above the net sellable area of the apartments. The main savings was in the cost of land: each acre could fit in 3 or times the number of terrace houses while both building and infrastructure costs for each unit were also lower. There were savings in infrastructure cost as well because there are shorter runs of pipes, sewers roads and drains for each apartment unit in a compact multi-storey building compared with that found in a sprawling terrace house layout.

All in all, compared to terrace houses, the building cost per square foot of net sellable area is about the same. However, you could fit in 60 low-cost flats in an acre of land or about 40 medium cost ones. So, there was a considerable saving in both land and infrastructure cost.

In the 90’s my firm designed and oversaw the construction of thousands of 5-storey walk-up apartments. The most common design had a single staircase access that served 4 units. It was a particularly efficient with minimal circulation space and sellable net floor area of about 94%.

The main disadvantage of this building type is how the value of the apartments decline the higher up they were. The first-floor units were the easiest to sell; the 4^th floor ones, the hardest. This was supported by a study done at low-cost and medium cost flats that my firm designed in Kajang. In the medium-cost flats, we placed more expensive flats (RM90,000) on the lower floors and slightly smaller lower-cost ones (RM60,000) on the upper floors. The units sold briskly: the more expensive ones on the lower floors sold faster than the cheaper ones on the upper floors. It was obvious that the upper floors were less desirable.

In the low-cost apartments next door which were sold at the heavily subsidized price of RM42,000, the lower floors were taken up. But at the time the study was undertaken, a couple of years after completion, the upper floors remained unsold.

However, with a slightly bigger budget the upper floors can be made more marketable by adding a lift to each block. They wouldn’t be too expensive: they serve only five floors and need not be fire-rated; downtime for maintenance is acceptable without having a second back-up.

Following the theoretical work that I had done with point blocks, in the 90’s my firm designed and oversaw the construction of thousands of 5-storey walk-up apartments. The most common design had a single staircase access that served 4 units. It was a particularly efficient with minimal circulation space and net sellable net floor area (NFA) of about 94% of the gross floor area (GFA).

From the point block idea, it was a short step to producing low-rise Honeycomb apartments. The first proposal that follows is a proposal for a 60-acre site in a semi-rural area that achieves 40 units per acre shown here The second is for a small 2-acre site that has a density above 60 units per acre, and that will be in the next post.

More recently the federal government finally introduced a separate “Affordable Housing” initiative, but many of the negative elements of the low-cost housing policy remain because State Governments have the ultimate say in land matters.

Perbadanan PR1MA Malaysia was established under the PR1MA Act 2012 to plan, develop, construct and maintain high-quality housing with lifestyle concepts for middle-income households in key urban centres. PR1MA homes come in various types and sizes within an integrated community; sensibly designed to suit different household needs. Priced between RM100,000 to RM400,000, you can now own a home that is well within your reach. Earmarked for development in key strategic urban areas nationwide, PR1MA is open to all Malaysians with a monthly household income between RM2,500 to RM10,000.

Whilst the low- cost housing policy was in effect, trying to get developers interested in Honeycomb housing in the medium-cost segment was extremely hard, but these ideas now are easier to apply to affordable housing than low-cost. In 2016, my firm was asked to propose an affordable housing scheme in a relatively rural part of mainland Penang. A very large piece of land had been offered for sale and the developer wanted to allocate 60 acres of it for affordable housing that would be constructed in a joint venture with PR1MA

In this area, people expect to live in terrace houses; apartment living is still not thought to be acceptable. Still, given the soft soil conditions and the expected high cost of infrastructural development, the developer did not believe that the construction of terrace houses at affordable prices would be profitable. In 2014, 3 times median income in Penang was only RM180,000.

I had previously planned a low-rise Honeycomb project for the developer in Alor Gajah. Could we do a medium-rise version of the high-rise Honeycomb concept here in this rural part of mainland Penang?

LOW-RISE HONEYCOMB APARTMENTS ON A HEXAGONAL GRID

Following on my work from the 1990’s we created a layout that is based on a hexagonal grid with the apartments arranged around courtyard gardens. This is the basic layout that takes up a quarter of the whole site.

This the layout of the whole site:

The four quadrants each have their own access, we can enter two of them from the south and the other two from the north. At each entrance is a Surau and Dewan. In the centre of the quadrants is football field flanked by a clubhouse and a kindergarten and child-care facility.

The quadrant is fenced; at the entrance is a guardhouse. There is a main road that circles the quadrant and subsidiary roads branch off from the main road in a clear hierarchical manner.

The basic neighbourhood is a hexagonal space in between three V-shaped blocks which meet the minimum allowance of 40’ side -to-side distance and 30” rear-to-rear. The layout, which created large courtyard spaces between the three blocks provided much, much more than the minimum requirement of 60”.

The layout of each block adopts some of the features of high-rise honeycomb housing whereby the apartments are all accessed from courtyard floors about half the units are provided with a private garden.

The duplex apartments accessed from the third floor are linked to the floor above it or the floor below it. The apartments on the ground floor are either single storey apartments or apartments that link the 1^st floor.

This arrangement allows a covered garden 3-storeys high to be formed on the ground floor and sky-court on the third floor.

On the third floor, 10 units are provided with a private garden whilst 8 units do not have them. On the ground floor 8 units are provided with a private garden whilst 6 units do not have them. This compromise was proposed to meet the objection that not every buyer would appreciate the provision of a privately-owned front-yard and would be willing to pay for it.

In this layout, the 1.5 car parks were provided for each apartment unit with another 10% for visitors. The advantage of the hexagonal layout is that though it uses land efficiently, it can provide variety in the quality of spaces between the blocks in a way that is aesthetically pleasing.

The feasibility study for this proposal showed that there is good profit to be made if people are willing to buy it at prices from RM180,000. But will they? Some of the other consultants involved in the project were uncertain that they would accept the change from terrace to high-rise. If that is the case, it would be better to test the acceptability of Townhouses first.

Although the client was happy with this layout, there were regulatory difficulties in acquiring this piece of land and its implementation would have wait for a few more years or else a new site.

↧

A 5-Storey High-Density Honeycomb Apartment

January 12, 2017, 10:32 pm

≫ Next: Making Honeycomb Apartments Affordable: Building More Units to Reduce Land Cost

≪ Previous: From 5-storey Point Blocks to Honeycomb 5-storey V-Saped Apartments

The ground level is slightly lowered to make it into a lower-ground floor ground floor and is fully utilized to provide car parking. If laid out efficiently, the number of car parks provided will be able to support up to 60 units of apartments per acre. The upper-ground floor is slightly elevated and is connected to the main street with a ramp.

On the upper-ground floor are single-storey apartments arranged around double storey courtyards. Surau, Dewan and some shops can also be provided on this floor. Two floors above this, on the second floor are another set of courtyards which are partially open to the sky. Here, the courtyards provide access to duplex apartment units in the typical high-rise Honeycomb layout.

The Honeycomb layout proposed provides a private front-yard to each unit well as a communal garden shared by groups of 8 duplex apartments on the 2^ndfloor and 4 single-storey apartment units on the upper-ground floor. The typical size of the duplex front-yard is 8sm. The landscaped communal courtyard area that serve 8 duplex apartments are 4m x 12m. On the upper ground the typical front-yard is 12sm and the communal courtyard is 5m x 8m.

The apartments are like terrace houses where residents have a front garden facing a car-free “street” in the air where children can play. In trying to convince purchasers who prefer conventional landed property which are too expensive, playing on this imagery can help make apartment living more desirable.

The efficient use of the lower ground floor makes it possible to design up to 60 units on each acre of development land using only a 5-storey building type. In this way, the benefit of high-density is achieved without recourse to going above 5-stories and having multi-storey car parks with all the extra costs that these features entail. This results in a lower cost structure that combines both low construction and land cost.

We can further add value to the cost-efficient 5-storey walk-up flat by providing lifts and adopting the Honeycomb layout. They wouldn’t be too expensive: they serve only five floors and unlike lifts that serve taller buildings, need not be fire-rated; downtime for maintenance is acceptable without having a second back-up lift next to it. In the 5-storey Honeycomb Apartment Layout, the lifts need only stop on the lower-ground floor (car park), upper-ground floor and 2^ndfloor only.

There is a mix of duplex and single-storey apartments of differing sizes in this layout. It was designed specifically to meet the low-cost, low-medium cost and affordable categories of housing that is mandatory in the State of Johor with smaller single storey units in less desirable locations assigned as low-cost and low-medium cost houses. In this way, the building of separate buildings for each housing category is unnecessary. Shops are also provided to make this mixed income community even more conducive to the development of a healthy community.

This high-density low-rise apartment block is different from conventional slab blocks in that it is much wider. This partially explains how sufficient units can be provided on each floor to achieve 60 units per acre. The other important reason for it is the efficient layout of car parks on the ground floor to achieve the sufficient number of car parks.

This design would be suitable for infill sites in most suburbs where there are already terrace houses built or going to be built, but which have become too expensive for most people.

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Making Honeycomb Apartments Affordable: Building More Units to Reduce Land Cost

March 6, 2017, 1:51 am

≫ Next: The Checkerboard Plan

≪ Previous: A 5-Storey High-Density Honeycomb Apartment

When we look at major urban centres like Kuala Lumpur, Penang and Johor Bahru the problem of affordable housing appears daunting. The high price of land requires that very high-density apartments high-rise, but there is a cap on how many houses may be built on each acre of land. Even if allowed a higher cap, high-rise buildings are expensive to build. Not only the apartments, but also the multi-level car parking blocks that must be built.

Here, we look at a high-density apartment design that tries to overcome three hurdles that beset affordability in the main urban centres of Malaysia: how to reduce the high cost of land, the higher costs of constructing tall buildings and the cost of building car parks.

REDUCING LAND COST BY BUILDING MORE UNITS ON EACH ACRE

One way to reduce the cost of land is to have more units share this cost. But the intensity of housing development in Malaysia is controlled by restrictions on the number of housing units that can be built on each acre. At present, most local authorities still only allow high-rise housing up to a density of 60 units per acre, but official thinking about it is changing.

Why do Authorities want to impose density restrictions? The answer must be that people are worried about the negative effects of overcrowding. However, we have already made the point that as we build taller Honeycomb apartments, we also add more green, social spaces that be used for gardening, social interaction and children’s outdoor play.

If indeed, providing each home a private and a shared garden can overcome the social defects of high-rise housing, then why not allow even higher densities, especially if it is to make living in the city more affordable? Very high-density housing is already a fact, albeit under the alternative name of serviced apartments. However, serviced apartments that have been mainly built on prime commercial land have generally been too small and expensive, geared towards investors rather than home-makers.

The Draft National Guidelines on Planning (2013) proposes maximum densities of 60 units per acre for areas under District Councils, 80 units per acre for areas under City Halls or Town Councils and 90 units per acre for Transit Oriented Development within those areas.

PR1MA, a government company tasked with building affordable housing, especially for urban dwellers, has come up with guideline that allow for much higher densities than is normally approved. This is a snip from their guidelines:

According to this, the allowable development intensity for areas under District Councils is upped to 80 units per acre in a rural area and 80-120 units per acre in suburban area, for areas under Town Councils, 120-150 units per acre, and for City Councils, 150 units per acre.

Given how various government bodies are rethinking the issue of development intensity, it makes sense to make the case for allowing higher densities as a strategy to make housing affordable. Doubling the density of a housing development effectively halves the cost of land for each unit. Not only is that a significant amount for urban land, there are also additional savings in the cost of providing infrastructural services for each unit.

The range of high-density options that will be explored below will include all the higher densities that PR1MA has asked for, as well as a prototype for around 200 units per acre.

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The Checkerboard Plan

March 13, 2017, 8:02 am

≫ Next: Tall Buildings Cost More than Shorter Ones; How to Maximize Site Coverage

≪ Previous: Making Honeycomb Apartments Affordable: Building More Units to Reduce Land Cost

The medium-rise Honeycomb apartment with the checkerboard-plan can provide an answer to the problem of affordable housing in the main urban centres of Malaysia. Let me first introduce the concept.

The basic checkerboard layout plan consists of eight duplex units arranged along a 3-storey high sky-court.

Figure 1 A sky-court neighbourhood of 8 units

On each floor are four of these sky-courts that are linked by a lift lobby.

Figure 2 Four sky-courts on one floor in one block

This is the view of the 3-storey sky-court. In this “Honeycomb Apartment” concept, every resident can step out of her main door to her front yard and beyond that, a landscaped courtyard – or “sky-court” with a garden fence off the edge.

Figure 3 View of 3-storey Courtyard

The doors lining the courtyard on the right are the front doors to the apartments. All apartments in this “neighbourhood in the sky” will have such doors, leading into a lofty three storey high sky-court which contains private and shared gardens.

This is a look at the floor plans of a pair of apartments. As per the Honeycomb apartment arrangement, units on the courtyard garden level either have stairs going down to bedrooms on the floor below, or have stairs going up to bedrooms on the floor above. The typical apartment is a duplex unit with living room, dining and kitchen on the courtyard level and three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a utility space and a dry yard on the upper level or the level below.

Figure 4 One level above, Courtyard level, and one level below

Residents here enjoy the benefits of a Honeycomb neighbourhood. They share a communal courtyard with small number of other households, making it easy for neighbours to get to know and interact each other. There is sufficient space and light to garden just outside their home.

With many “eyes” overlooking the sky-court along with safety measures such as a garden fence at the edge of the sky-court and child barriers at strategic locations, the sky-court can be made safe for children. Children can play just outside in the courtyard, making this apartment more suitable for families.

The typical floor plans of medium-rise Honeycomb apartments are shown below:

Figure 5 Podium Level and Podium Level + 1

Figure 6 Floor below Cortyard level, Courtyard Level, and floor above Courtyard Level

Figure 7 The Honeycomb 3-storey Courtyard Arrangement

Figure 8 Another view of the Couutyard

Eight apartments front the typical courtyard, about 8 x 16 metres on plan and 9 metres high. They each have a front-yard 4m wide and 2.4m deep where residents can tend their own garden. It also provides a buffer between bypassing residents and the front door, providing a measure of privacy to the living room and still allowing people inside a view of the sky-court.

By securing the edge with an anti-climb fence and securing access to the lift lobby and escape staircases, the courtyard is suitable for smaller children to play with their parents and neighbours looking on.

Figure 9 Entrance View

At the ground level, the entrance is connected to the public street by stairs that go up a sloped garden that screens the car park behind it. Off the entrance are two courtyards opposite each other which have shops; they each lead to the two wings of the apartment block. In the middle is a community centre with Surau, multi-purpose hall and kindergarten.

Figure 10 View of Entrance Court

The high density of 130 units per acre is achieved by the 12-storey version of the checkerboard plan which has a basement car park where the parking standard is 2.2 car parks per apartment, or with just the ground floor car park where the requirement is 1.1 car park per apartment.

Figure 11 View of 12 Storey Version

Figure 12 Another View of 12-storey version

Unlike conventional high-rise apartments which have similar densities, here the housing blocks are not divorced from the street level, separated by multiple levels of car parks. The ground floor car park can be easily screened-off from the front by a garden that slopes up to the first floor and from the sides and rear by walls and rows of trees.

The bulky mass of blocks is also easily broken up by the sky-courts and façade treatment which introduce strong vertical elements that counter the horizontality of the floors. Adopting duplex floor plans also avoids the monotonous repetition of window patterns on the elevation.

The checkerboard-plan is just another variation of X-plan Honeycomb apartment layout that was introduced in Chapter 11. In this version, the sky-courts are three storeys rather than six. The cost saving features of the X-plan have been retained:

Corridors have been eliminated and substituted instead by sky-courts.
The lifts stop only on every three floors: compared to having to stop at every floor, fewer lifts can be installed without increasing waiting time

However, to solve the real-world problem of providing housing in Malaysia’s major urban centres, more cuts need to be made.

How the checkerboard-plan can make high densities acceptable, maximize site coverage to fit in more units on medium-rise buildings and provide sufficient car parks efficiently will be discussed in the next post.

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Tall Buildings Cost More than Shorter Ones; How to Maximize Site Coverage

March 15, 2017, 2:34 am

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Even if authorities allow higher densities, high-rise would still be expensive. Taller buildings cost more to build compared to lower ones. As we go higher, there are thresholds above which costs become disproportionately more onerous.

Structures cost more the higher we go, as the columns on the lower floors need to be stronger and as lateral forces become more critical.

Below five storeys, lifts are not considered to be necessary, but at five storeys or above, we must provide them. As we go higher, more lifts are required, not only increasing the cost of installing and maintaining them, but also taking up more space, and thus reducing net sellable area. Lifts above 20, 30 and 50 stories also get disproportionately expensive as they need to move faster and must carry longer and heavier cable ropes.

With respect to fire-safety, above seven stories (top most floor 18.3m above fire appliance access level), fire-fighting lifts and “dry-risers” to pipe up water and hose-reels are required. Above 10 storeys (30.5m fire appliance access level), a wet riser, associated storage tanks and hose reels are required.

As for construction, taller buildings take longer to build because there are more floor cycles to work through, because materials must be transported higher. Blocks lower than 10 stories do not even need a tower crane. In short, shorter buildings are cheaper. But can we design them to a high density?

DEEP PLANS: MAXIMIZING SITE COVERAGE

Current high-rise typologies are narrow buildings: the slab block with a single-loading corridor can be described as a single-layer of apartments; the slab block with a double loading corridor is a double-layer arrangement; the tower block, a circular layer of apartments.

In housing, we want almost every room to have natural light and ventilation. There cannot be deep plans like that found for offices, where mechanical and electrical systems bring in artificial ventilation and lighting to the central portion of the building which are far away or cut off from the windows and the building’s edge.

The typical Malaysian apartment will have at least the living room and master bedroom having windows on the external walls of the building and less important rooms facing an air well. The depth of the unit measured from the external wall is about 8 metres. With a 2m corridor in the middle, the total width of this double-loading corridor block layout, with two layers of apartments, is not much more than 16m.

The width of the single loading corridor with only a single layer of apartments, is about half of this. The tower block, with a circular layer of apartments, can be wider; each side is typically 24m.

In contrast to these existing typologies, the Honeycomb checkerboard-plan has a depth of over 40 metres. This deep plan results in a residential floor plan that covers more of the land available on as site compared to that achieved by skinny conventional floor plans. Using the available land more efficiently allows more units to be built on every floor and so can provide higher densities without having to go taller; it should become easier to achieve high plot ratios like deep plan offices.

Figure 14Apartment Typologies and Minimum Land Required

For a comparison, we take the different floor plans, apply 60’ front setback and 25’side and rear setbacks to form the minimum site boundaries for each example. We measure the area and divide it by the number of apartment units on a typical floor to show how big an area is needed to accommodate one apartment unit. The checkerboard-plan is the most efficient as it takes up the least amount of land compared with the other examples.

Table 1 Comparison of Site Coverage: Per floor Density

	No of Units /Floor	Site Area (sf)	Site Area /Unit	Units on Floor/Acre
Woodlands Drive, Singapore	6	35,731	553.4	7.3
Single Loading Corridor
Blues Point Tower , Sydney	4	22,555	524.1	7.7
Tower Block
Membina Court, Singapore	10	50,903	473.1	8.6
Cluster Block
Binapuri Tower, Selangor	8	37,554	436.3	9.3
Double Loading Corridor
Honeycomb	10.67	43,264	376.8	10.7
Checkerboard -Plan

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Overcoming the Problem of Car Parks for High-Density High-Rise

March 19, 2017, 6:15 pm

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THE PROBLEM OF CAR PARKS FOR HIGH RISE
Malaysia is reputed to have one of the highest levels of car ownership in the world. The planning requirement for apartments is two units of car parks for each unit, plus another 10% for visitors. This is a very high requirement compared to most other countries and has the effect of making our high-rise housing expensive.

MEETING HIGH CAR-PARKING REQUIREMENTS WITH THE CHECKERBOARD PLAN

As we design taller buildings to achieve higher densities, just adding on parks on the ground is not the way to do it. The additional area required to cater for the additional car parks increase the development land required: since density is units/land area, increasing the numerator is pointless if at the same time, we increase the denominator.

To achieve higher densities, multi-level car parks are necessary. They can be placed in an adjacent block or below the tower. Constructing an adjacent block is cheaper but at the cost of being requiring an additional area, hence resulting in a lower density. But whichever of the two, the effect on the distribution of built-up area is that a large built-up area is now dedicated for cars: the net sellable area becomes a smaller proportion of the total built-up area. Car parks takes up a lot of space. Each car needs an 8’ x 16’ space that works out to 128sf. The driveway takes up 20’. All in all, with ramps and having to consider building columns and staircases, the gross built-up area required for one car park is about 260sf: in fact, actual car parks make up less than half of the total area of a multilevel car park block. Two car parks for each apartment plus another 10% for visitors takes up 572sf of car park built-up area. This is more than half the size of a typical affordable apartment.

Net sellable floor area expressed as a percentage of total built-up area for high-rise, including the multi-level car park plummets is often less than 55%. The fact is, the car parking requirement for high-rise high-density housing has become a very heavy burden on the cost of construction.
Again, PR1MA is aware of this problem and have produced their own guidelines which try to address this problem. In their table, A1, the car park provision for rural areas is set at 2.2, suburban and urban areas at 1.65 and 1.1 in cities. Although this standard may face resistance from local authorities and householders used to the convenience of having two cars, in the longer term, promoting a less car-dependant life style makes sense.

Already, the average size of households in Malaysia has peaked , bringing down the average number of cars per household. With the expansion of public transport in Kuala Lumpur and the Klang Valley, plus the explosive growth in share-riding services like Uber and Grab, owning a car is not essential for young working people, as it once was. I believe that PR1MA can do a good job in convincing local authorities home-buyers to buy into the concept of the compact city that promotes high residential density, mixed use and is oriented towards pedestrians rather than cars.

The efficiency of car parks can be operationally improved by doing away with parking spaces that are strictly allotted. As currently practiced, car parking spaces are allotted as accessory parcels to each owner. However, this ends up with a lot of car parks being empty for long periods. A pooled system, as found in commercial buildings, can cut this slack, providing more car parking opportunities with fewer actual slots.

In fact, PR1MA’s guidelines presumes only two basic options – a stand-alone multi-level car park or a podium car park that sits below the building block.

Figure 15 Multi-level Podium Car Park

The latter is of course more efficient than the former. But the podium is still a poor choice. The podium takes up space larger than footprint of the tower or slab block above it. This increases the land area that is needed. The car park podium also must be set back from the boundary by about 50’ from the front and 25’ from the side. Having to do so results in having fewer cars than car parks on the ground floor which are subject to much lower setback lines.

Is there a better solution?

DEEP PLANS: PROVIDING CAR PARKS MORE EFFICIENTLY

The checkerboard-plan was conceived to be car park design-friendly with columns spaced in an 8m grid. A car park circulation system also fits neatly into the 5-layered grid with two roads inside the building footprint feeding car parks on both sides.

Figure 16 Columns in 8.1m grid

There is a road that circles the outside of the building: it too feeds car parks on both sides. The ground floor plan is shown below.

Figure 17 Ground Floor Car Park Plan

On just one floor the design is already very efficiently with up to a density 136 units per acre and this one floor is good enough to support a residential density of 60 units per acre when the car park requirement is 2.2 car parks per apartment, 90 units per acre when the car park requirement is 1.65 car parks per apartment unit, and 120 units per acre when the car park requirement is 2.2 car parking spaces per apartment.

But can we provide for even higher densities? Is there an alternative to the conventional multi-level podium car park?

Our answer is to replicate the ground floor car parking layout in a basement floor. In fact, basement car parks are generally not considered at all for residential development because they are thought to be costly to build, needing temporary shoring and permanent waterproofed retaining walls, and costly to maintain, with a mechanical system to draw in fresh air and expel fumes as well as a smoke-spill system in case of fire.

Yet, a single basement level 7’ or more away from the boundary does not need temporary shoring or an expensive water-proofed retaining wall. An 8’ rubble retaining wall at the boundary plus a low 1’ concrete one on the car park building line will suffice, creating an air-well that provides natural ventilation, daylighting, a green planting strip and setback distance to meet current planning requirements.

Figure 18 Perimeter Retaining Wall and Air-well
It is also easy to design an access to a single basement floor, doing away with having too many ramps as shown in the plan below.

Figure 19 Basement Car Park Plan

As shown in the basement car park plan above, just two car park levels can already support a building above it that contains 133 units per acre when the standard is 2.2 car parks per acre, 170 units per acre when the standard is 1.65 car parks per acre, and 275 units per acre when the standard is 1.1 car parks per acre.

The options available are displayed in the drawings below.

A design strategy that achieves high-density with shorter buildings and which either eliminates the car-park podium or else substitutes it with a low-cost single basement floor will surely reduce construction cost and time. Combining it with a lower car parking standard and as well as a loosening of the cap on density will further multiply the savings.

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BCIAsia Equinox - a Boutique Exhibition in Kuala Lumpur, 11th November

November 6, 2016, 7:05 pm

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I will be giving a talk at this event next Friday courtesy of BCIAsia on high-rise Honeycomb. I'm preparing a more relaxed, version of the CTBUH presentation last week, taking up maybe 35 minutes instead of 25.

This is also the same material that I will use from chapter 10 of the book that I am blogging.

So I've decided to skip about five intervening chapters to start posting about high-rise Honeycomb this week.

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High-rise housing

November 7, 2016, 8:48 am

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When I was a student in the 1970’s, experts were lining up to criticise social high-rise housing. This was the time when the infamous Pruitt Igoe high-rise apartments in the United States were being demolished.

Study after study showed that living in high-rise housing is less suited for habitation compared to more traditional kinds of dwellings.

A review of 129 high-rise research papers over 56 years on the human experience of tall buildings found little empirical support for high-rise housing.

Aren't there any existing solutions on offer?

Green, social spaces on High-Rise Housing

One position to take is of course to insist high-rise housing should not be built at all. Another, is that somehow, high-rise housing is suitable for the rich but not the poor. Still, there have been attempts to overcome the drawbacks of high rise housing. We can look at the idea of providing gardens in the sky as a means of overcoming the social drawbacks of high-rise.

An early, celebrated one is Habitat '67, in Montreal by Moshe Safdie, a multi-storey housing project designed in a cascading pattern such that each apartment has its own private garden. However, providing each apartment with its own garden proved costly, and after Habitat 67, there have hardly been any apartment project that do so (Safdie, World Architecture Festival, 2015).

Habitat ‘67, Montreal

But that was until Singapore entered the picture in a big way with the Pinnacle@Duxton by a local firm, ARC Studio, which was completed in 2009. Singapore had always emphasized tree planting and making their crowded island green; they were now extending their parks upwards. The phrase “sky-rise greenery” was coined.

The Pinnacle@Duxton , ARC Studio

More recently, a spate of new projects that provide green communal spaces in the upper levels of high-rise housing. Today new projects such as the Interlace (OMA Architects), Sky Habitat (Safdie), SkyVille@Dawson (SCDA Architects) and SkyTerrace@Dawson (WOHA) grace the pages of architectural magazines around the world.

The Interlace (OMA Architects)

Sky Habitat, Singapore (Safdie Associates)

SkyVille@Dawson in the foreground (WOHA) and

SkyTerrace@Dawson (SCDA Architects)

To my mind this trend really important in making much needed social improvements in high-rise housing. Indeed, these green social spaces in the air in these green social spaces in the air in should become more common-place.

But whilst providing sky-rise greenery is great, “sky-terraces” or “sky-courts” are extra expenses that have to be paid for. These sky-courts also take up space that could be used to fit in more apartments and so represent an opportunity cost. The issues of cost make sky-rise greenery both less affordable and less likely to be adopted by developers.

However, I believe that we can actually design them a way that makes it affordable for more people. What I will be introducing to you today is a layout concept where, additional areas for private and shared gardens in the sky courts can be balanced by a big reduction in the need for circulation space - achieved by largely eliminating the need for corridors.

And my aim is to try to convince you of that. But first, What exactly is wrong with high-rise housing?

It has been suggested that the defects of high rise housing spring mainly from the quality of these spaces between the street and the apartment, what author and architect Dalziel calls “intermediate spaces”, and which he laments as “weird anonymous space... neither public nor private”.

Corridor

Lift lobby

These spaces are neither suited for children to play in or for adults to socialize.

A recent CTBUH article suggests that articulating the threshold between public and private domains by introducing the missing element of the semi-private realm has long been a challenge; failure to do so is a major drawback of the high rise residential typology.

From “Jan Gehl”, Cities for People, pp83

A blind corridor from Corbusier's Unite D'Habitation

Architect cum researcher Oscar Newman said about the same thing 40 years ago. Newman had observed that across the street from apartments that were eventually demolished was an older, low-rise complex occupied by people from the same background whichremained fully occupied and trouble-free throughout the decline of the high-rise.

Newman’s theory was that it was the quality of the spaces just outside the low-rise homes compared with those outside the high-rise that made the difference. He recommended that architects design in semi-private / semi- public spaces in between the dwellings and the street.

A low-rise solution: for everyone a private and a shared garden

His influence over my work of the last 10 years is very obvious. I try to create – through the arrangement of a private and a shared garden for each house - what Oscar Newman called “Defensible Space”; trying to humanize “intermediate space” and “articulating the threshold between public and private domains.”

In what I called “Honeycomb housing”, small groups of houses are laid out around a communal courtyard like friends sitting around a table.

The features of Honeycomb housing compared to conventional terrace houses make it easier for parents to allow their children to play outside their homes, encourage neighbours to know and interact with each other and perhaps even promote helping behaviour.

Compared to the conventional terrace house grid layout, the Honeycomb cul-de-sacs reduced the amount of land taken up by roads and increased the area available for private and shared gardens.

The previous chapters have outlined all this; I now want to do something similar for high-rise apartments.

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High-Rise Housing Proposal in Danau Kota, Kuala Lumpur

November 26, 2016, 7:18 am

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This was a proposal to redevelop about over 13 acres of land in Setapak, Kuala Lumpur which contains a large mining pool and which functions as a water retention pond. About half of the plot is below water surrounded by about 6.5 acres of land that can be developed.

The location is within a well built up area near a major road, high-rise apartment and a commercial centre. The client wanted to realize the value to the land by increasing placing serviced apartments and commercial on it while converting the pond into a public park.

The Brief

We proposed to meet the potential demand for high-end serviced apartments with club and hotel standard amenities on the land found North of the pond with commercial units along the Southern boundary fronting Jalan Genting Kelang.

The Solution

Five blocks of 30 storey apartments were placed on a 4-storey podium block which houses the apartment facilities and car parking.

The apartments were laid out in a modified split-level arrangement with the living room at the courtyard level, the kitchen, dining and bedroom 3 half a floor above or below it, and the master bedroom, bedroom 2 and bathrooms a full floor above or below the courtyard level.

The Danau Kota proposal was only one of many Honeycomb high-rise proposals.

A Dead End?

Four years after first developing the high-rise honeycomb idea, we had prepared many proposals but none yet had been taken up by any developer. The model that I had pushed, the X-Plan, was perhaps perceived too luxurious in the provision of courtyards. They were always thought of as being most suitable for luxury condominiums. But, my experience and reputation were in affordable housing, not high-end.

I could only tout the X-Plan as being no more expensive than conventional high-rise designs. And there was uncertainty even in in that: developers can take advantage of the savings from eliminating corridors and providing fewer lifts, but will authorities approve higher densities?

What would be the cost of providing and maintaining the courtyards and the landscaping? Six storeys high, they were open to the sky to allow even grass to grow. But potential clients asked: would driving rain would be a problem? Isn’t a roofed walkway necessary to connect the lift lobby to the unit? At what cost?

And what about the cost of the staircase in each home?

Would the high-rise Honeycomb be suitable for affordable housing in Malaysia?

I did not have the answers at that time. I had to simply accept that the idea wasn’t yet sufficiently compelling. I decided that the best way to progress further was to answer that last question. If the ordinary Malaysian can afford to own a Honeycomb apartment, then it would be compelling.

A tough challenge!.

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The Honeycomb Shop-Apartment

December 27, 2016, 8:42 am

≫ Next: Reducing the Development Cost of High-Density High-Rise by 10 - 20%

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If the Kotapuri Shop-apartment concept works for low-cost housing, then it is quite easy to develop it further by adopting the Honeycomb concept.

This proposal for a piece of land near Putrajaya shows how the value of the floors above shops can be maximized.

Ground Floor

First Floor Podium

2nd, 3rd & 5th Floor Plans

4th Foor Courtyard Floor Plan

Instead of the Kotapuri perimeter block layout that creates an internal courtyard, here large recesses in the external elevation form sky-courts on the First Floor and the Third Floor of the building. These elevated courtyards provide light and ventilation to the apartments that are arranged around them.

The provision of private and communal gardens for the apartments make them suitable for family living even though they are just above shops and commercial activities. In this example, there are 5 stories of apartments above the shops at Ground Floor and parking for these apartments at the Lower Ground Level.

If possible, provide all the parking outdoors off the road the circles the block. This would be a cheaper solution than basement car parks.

The layout of the apartments is typical: much like the duplex apartments that have been designed for the earlier examples of high and medium-rise housing.

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Reducing the Development Cost of High-Density High-Rise by 10 - 20%

September 6, 2017, 10:03 am

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The key inventive step in the Honeycomb apartment concept is the elimination of corridors and replacing them instead with of sky-courts. Re-inventing how residents are connected from the public street to their individual apartments overcomes the social problems that have been linked to the nature of corridors and “intermediate space” but also opens up to various ways of reducing costs.

The chart below that breaks down the selling price of a typical apartment helps us better understand by how much the checkerboard can help make housing affordable.

Here the components that make up the price of a typical apartment is listed with the bigger costs at the bottom. In this example, the biggest cost factor is land followed by the cost of architectural works, profit, car park, M&E services, superstructure, infrastructure, consultant’s fees, bridging loan, substructure, preliminaries, marketing costs and contributions.

The key thing about the Honeycomb checkerboard-plan is that it simultaneously attacks these multiple cost-centres:

Most significantly, higher densities also allow the cost of land for each unit to be substantially reduced: more units share the cost of the land.
By radically reducing corridors and improving the plan efficiency, the gross floor area is reduced, and the cost of architectural works is reduced in the same way.
By reducing the gross area and the number of floors needed to support the set number of car parks, the cost of building them is substantially reduced.
With fewer lifts, their costs and the costs of gen-sets and electrical supply supporting them go down. Lower fire-risk of shorter buildings also bring down the M&E costs.
The lower GFA and smaller columns needed to support a shorter building reduce the structural cost.
More units share the cost of infrastructure that is based on land size.
The interest payable for the bridging loan is lower when the building is finished faster.
The substructure cost is reduced proportionately to the reduction in GFA
The preliminaries lower due to lower cranage and if the building is finished faster.
Marketing costs is lower when the apartment has desirable features found in more expensive products.
More units share the cost of contributions that is based on land size.

From this list, all but two of the cost-centres mentioned above have been affected. But these two factors – profit and consultant fees – are calculated based on a percentage of development cost and when this has been substantially reduced, so can the amount of profit and fees for consultants. So, in both direct and indirect ways, we have shown that ALL the cost-centres have been tackled by the checkerboard design.

This validates the strategy that we have adopted. To really reduce the cost of homes to make them affordable, re-looking at the apartment typology and re-designing it from first principles offers a way forward.

10 to 20% SAVINGS

All these cost-savings point to checkerboard-plan apartments to be even cheaper to build than conventional high-rise.

A preliminary estimate of all the savings discussed above indicates that it is possible for affordable housing below RM300 per square foot to be provided in the major city centres where the price of land is within RM300 per square foot and where the density permitted is 130 units an acre and the parking standard is 2.2 car park per unit.

A COMPARATIVE STUDY

A study has been done to compare an actual project with a hypothetical Honeycomb alternative on the same site. We were able to enlist the help of the Quantity Surveyor of a real project near Putrajaya by PR1MA, a government-owned company tasked with delivering 500,000 affordable homes by 2020. At the time of writing, the project was at piling stage.

Against this existing project based on a conventional design, a Honeycomb alternative was designed and it was costed by the Quantity Surveyor using information provided by Arkitek M Ghazali and its Structural and M&E engineers.

The initial result shows that the potential savings are as substantial as we expected. The following table presents a summary.

Instead of two 15-storey blocks with a separate 6-storey car park block, we just had five 8 storey blocks on the car parking all on the ground floor. Naturally, there was a reduction in the construction cost per square foot of gross built-up area (GFA): just over 9% from RM119 to RM109.

The average Net Saleable Area for each unit of only 88.11sm is increased by 21% to 106.75sm, but allied with a slight reduction in Gross Development Area: the efficiency of the layout, i.e. The Net Saleable Area as a percentage of the Gross Development Area has greatly increased from 49% to 60%. This means that there is a huge reduction in the construction cost per square foot of Net Sellable area of just over 24.8% from RM242 to RM182!

In this example, the Honeycomb alternative had a slightly lower density, 62 units per acre instead of 70. But with bigger units the Net Plot Ratio slightly increases from 1.52 to 1.56, causing a slight reduction in land cost per square foot of saleable area. With the land priced at only RM80 per square foot, the effect is not large.

However, with important land component of development costs virtually unchanged, the large reduction in construction cost has a more moderate effect on Selling Price: the alternative design can be sold at the average price of RM273 per square foot instead of RM323, a reduction of about 15%.

Table 2 A COMPARATIVE STUDY

SITE INFO	EXISTINGPR1MA PROJECT	HONEYCOMB ALTERNATIVE
Site	Real site with irregular boundaries	The exact same site
Description	Two 15-storey apartment block and a separate 6-storey car park block with amenities and facilities.	Five 9-storey linked honeycomb blocks apartments with facilities and entrance on the 1st floor of one block and car parks all on the ground floor.
Size	6.72 acres at RM80 psf	6.72 acres at RM80 psf
KEY COST MEASURES
Gross Floor Area/ Units (m2)	179.48	177.95
Net Sellable Area /Unit (m2)	88.11	106.75
Efficiency	49%	60%
Apartment Block Height	15 storeys	8 storeys
Car Park Floors	6 floors (separate)	1 floor
No of Lift stops	15 stops	4 stops
Density	70 unit/acre	62 unit/acre
Net Plot Ratio	1.52	1.56
Cost/GFA (RM)	119	109
Cost/NSA	242	182
Selling Price/NSA	323	273
PRICE REDUCTION		15%

This is well in the middle of our estimate for the cost savings achievable by the Honeycomb Apartment layout compared with conventional design. In this example, cost savings from construction was maximized and potential cost savings from land was not exploited because the land price was relatively cheap.

At RM80 per square foot, the potential savings from land did not merit the added cost of adding more residential floors and digging in a half basement car park. However, in cases where land is more expensive, the calculation would yield a different result.

CONCLUSION

Architects are not well known for helping to cut the cost of construction: it is said that every line an architect draws add cost. If so, it’s better that we not draw anything at all, just let the engineers or builders do it.

I write this only half-jokingly because it is a very common perception and, after these 20 chapters, I hope to have shown it to be wrong.

When I was one of several architects doing low-cost mass housing work for in the late 90’s, the client had in mind that we adopt a standard design and the design responsibility of each architect was to do the make -up work on the façade to give some sort of identity to each project.

The hope at that time was that the standardized design of housing units would allow Industrial Building Systems of constructions to be adopted, taking advantage of the large numbers of repetitive elements to be manufactured and assembled.

Speeding up construction time, minimizing wet trades on site, taking advantage of economies of scale, manufacturing techniques and reducing labour, especially the need for skilled labour, all these can surely help reduce the cost of building homes. But we must take a realistic perspective.

The cost of constructing a house is an important cost centre but it’s not the only one. There is the land to acquire, infrastructural services to provide and many other development costs to bear. Even just looking at construction costs, IBS mainly affects the cost of structural and wall elements, which in conventional construction only makes up about half of the building cost.

If structure and walls make up only half of the building cost and building cost contribute to only, say, 50% of the selling price of a home, then an IBS method of construction that involves only structure and wall directly attacks only a 24% component of the cost of construction, equivalent to roughly 12% of the price that a buyer pays for the home. So, if an IBS system saves 10% off the cost of structure and walls, this can only deliver a 1.2% reduction in price. From my experience, it is unrealistic to expect savings of more than a few percent of the total construction cost.

So, whilst better methods of construction should be pursued, we also must look for ways to reduce the cost of infrastructure, land and other costs.

A CASE FOR MORE RESEARCH INTO NEW TYPOLOGIES

This is where design can help. Not just another iteration of existing apartment typologies, but a more fundamental re-examination of how homes have been designed. This is the basis of our research into new typologies.

In our Honeycomb Townhouse concept, compared to terrace houses, there is at least 50% more units on each acre of land and construction cost is also lower due to the sharing of roof, suspended floor and foundation between the upstairs and downstairs unit.

Compared to conventional terrace townhouses, both the upper and lower-level units have gardens, two car parks and ample window openings for all the rooms. We have shown at our project in Alor Gajah that if priced about 20% lower than a terrace house with the same floor area, people will buy them.

We have discovered through experience that five-storey walk-up flat is the cheapest housing typology in Malaysia. However, the two highest floors were hard to sell even when sold at the heavily subsidized prices.

The V-shaped Honeycomb Medium-Rise concept provides a very inexpensive lift that only shuttles between the ground floor and 3^rdfloor to serve all units, a communal courtyard for all, and private front-yards for some units, at an attractive block layout that achieves a density that is about four times that of terrace houses.

It is envisaged that if the typical apartment is priced about 20% lower than a terrace townhouse and 40% lower than a terrace house, people will buy them. This new concept might be suited at the edge of small towns.

In the suburbs of major urban centres where developers must provide low-cost housing, we have come up with the Kotapuri concept where the low-cost and low medium cost housing, priced between RM42,000 to RM100,000 are placed on top of shops. Although sold at a loss, the marginal cost of building each unit of low-medium cost unit is lower than its price; the marginal cost of building each unit of heavily subsidized low-cost unit is not too much higher than its price. In this case, the shops pay for the land and much of the infrastructure cost. In locations where there is no demand for offices above shops, it is better to use the space above it to provide housing units that liven up the area and provide housing for the people who tend the shops.

Designed and managed properly the commercial and residential components can add value to one another. In this way, the subsidized houses are located near amenities and public transport rather than shunted to the furthest, least attractive corner of a development.

In the Honeycomb apartment concept, the key inventive step is the elimination of corridors and replacing them instead with of sky-courts. Re-inventing how residents are connected from the public street to their individual apartments overcomes the social problems that have been linked to the nature of corridors and “intermediate space” but also opens up to various ways of reducing costs, making it possible to reduce pricing by up to 20%.

At the same time, we offer products that are more desirable, that can overcome the major social defects of high-density high-rise housing.

In the last few years, private and public developers have concentrated either on landed property that are expensive due to the escalating cost of land or else on high-density high-rise block that are very expensive to construct. These new low and medium-rise Honeycomb designs provide a wider range of alternatives that can serve an important gap in the housing market between terrace houses and high-rise apartments that most Malaysians cannot afford, and the subsidized low-cost and affordable housing that either lose money or provide thin margins.

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September 8, 2017, 7:46 pm

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