Housing affordability among gen Y: how to improve affordable housing schemes?

Abstract

Affordable housing is a prerequisite element to show a country is well-developed in terms of social economy growth and social welfare. While in the view of affordability, it is a relationship between and people. In fact, housing affordability issues happened in every world cities of the planet but no one envisages it properly especially when this issues fall upon on young generation, so-called Generation Y. Generally, this generation is the descendant of Baby Boomers/ Generation X, who born between the years 1979 and 1994. Gen Y is a cohort made up of about 60 million individuals and now makes 44% of the population in Malaysia. Comparing with their parent generation, Generation Y encounter incredibly high house prices, greater loans, significant financial stress and eventually trapped in financial planning crisis early in their life. However, the Malaysia government did realize the outrage of Malaysia citizen and introduced several housing schemes especially for those new workforces in nationwide. Those housing schemes are included Housing Loan Scheme, My First Home Scheme, Perumahan Rakyat 1 Malaysia (PRIMA), Rumah Idaman Rakyat, My Home Scheme and Youth Housing Scheme (YHS) which are beneficial to the first-homebuyers. Despite the efforts by Malaysian government, housing affordability still remains an issue among Malaysian Generation Y. Thus, this study carried out to determine the effectiveness of government affordable housing scheme and suggestion on how to improve it. It is also hope that it could be seen as able to contribute to the knowledge and understanding on housing affordability level for the young generation.