Abstract
D.Phil. (Engineering Management)
One of the greatest challenges faced by the post-1994 South African democratic government is an immense backlog and shortage of housing for poverty-stricken South Africans. Since 1994, the government has embarked on aspiring housing programmes in order to engage in mass delivery of housing, which was done to fulfill the vision of adequate housing for all, as reflected in the South African National Housing Policy Framework. Over the last seventeen years, the programmes have delivered more than 3 million houses to families, who had no proper housing previously, providing more than 13 million people with secure homes; thus ensuring that essential services were made available to advance the lives of ordinary people.
This research investigated and modeled subsidised low-income resident’s satisfaction. The primary aim of the research was to model to what extent dwelling unit features, neighbourhood features, building quality, services provided by government, beneficiary participation, needs and expectations predict the occupants’ residential satisfaction, which were classified as the exogenous variables. A conceptual integrated holistic residential satisfaction model was developed based on the theory developed from the literature review and the Delphi Study findings. The Questionnaire Survey was conducted for the purpose of validating the conceptual model. The survey was conducted in three metropolitan municipalities and one district municipality in the Gauteng Province of South Africa.
Results from the investigation pertained to three broad areas. The first results related to theory on housing studies. The findings were that the study addressed the lack of theoretical information about which factors are most significant in predicting resident satisfaction in subsidised low-income housing. The findings also revealed the theory that low-income housing occupants’ satisfaction is multi-faceted and that the latent variables thus lead to residential satisfaction outcome variables which could be used for residential satisfaction measurement.
The second set of findings relates to the Delphi Study. The findings from this study were that a number of factors (dwelling unit features, neighbourhood features amongst others), considered to be paramount determinants of residential satisfaction in South Africa low-income housing are similar to the determinants in other cultural contexts. Further findings from literature and the Delphi Study indicated that subsidised low-income housing residential satisfaction could be a six-factor model defined by the influence of dwelling unit features...