Affordable housing analysis in Malaysia: strategic challenges and way forward

Affordable housing is defined as housing that is adequate in quality and location but not so expensive that its tenants are unable to meet other basic living necessities. Malaysia's significant scarcity of affordable housing has become a national critical issue, compounded by growing urbanisation. This article digs into many difficulties that contribute to the housing crisis, such as the growing of high land value, land use restriction, land allocation and cost, lack of monitoring especially on government projects and accounts, unintegrated system within and among the ministries, technological changes, political instability, high expectation from the public and added with the bureaucratic bottleneck. The article critically assesses the Ministry of Housing and Local Government (MHLG) efforts to resolve this demanding situation. The study uses strategic management approaches such as PEST technique for external analysis, the McKinsey 7-S technique for internal analysis as well as SWOT technique for thorough analysis on the contributing factors with regards to the absence of affordable housing in Malaysia setting. Furthermore, the TOWS technique is utilized to generate feasible strategic options. This article hopes to bring significant insights to Malaysia's ongoing debate about affordable housing and influence future policy decisions aimed at tackling this critical challenge, detailing realistic ideas to improve the affordability of housing in Malaysia.