An Interruption...

I’ve too busy this last two weeks and have not been posting!

My 75 year old father-in-law had to go into hospital. Mr. Ghazali (by coincidence we share the same name)  had had a long history of high blood pressure and asthma, and for a couple of weeks beforehand, suffered from, what were to me, vague symptoms  -  anxiety, shallow breathing, water retention in the legs, sleepiness...

When finally it was decided to take him to hospital, he fell asleep on the way, and finally when he arrived at the hospital, did not wake up. By then his fingers had turned blue.

The immediate cause of the passing out was the high level of carbon dioxide in the blood. This showed in blood tests; drowsiness and bluishness in fingers and toes are common symptoms of CO2 poisoning.

He was put onto a ventilator to help with his breathing.

His other main symptom was difficulty in passing water, coupled with water retention (or oedema). So the doctors put on a catheter to drain away the urine and excess fluids from the body.

Ghazali’s condition looked bleak on the Saturday he was admitted. He was unconscious, was on a ventilator, and his whole body was swollen with oedema. But he responded to the most immediate treatment – the blood CO2 level came down and his swelling subsided and you could see his face and hands becoming wrinkly again. He could have woken up earlier but the doctors thought it better to keep him sedated – the ventilator worked better with the patient in this condition.

By Tuesday he was allowed to wake up and had a brain scan. They found that he had had a stroke!

But in the few days that followed it became apparent that the effects are turning out to be relatively minor. There doesn’t seem to be any sign of incapacity – my father-in-law can still speak and easily move both sides of his face and limbs. This is not what happens in severe cases of stroke. Thank God!

Ghazali can count himself lucky and he can look forward to coming back to our home. But his chronic high blood pressure stays with him. The latest reading was something like 167/65 (against 120/80 normal count). Such a big difference in the systolic (upper) and diastolic (lower) figures is symptomatic of hardened arteries. My wife has high blood pressure too, so I’m pestering her to get it down with diet and exercise, or else she should take medication.

This isn’t architectural blogging as usual, but often life (and death) has a way of intruding.

How much Families Earn and the Houses they can Afford

This is a picture of Household Incomes in Malaysia:



This chart was based on figures given by a Minister in July 2008 in Parliament. It shows what educated middle-class people living in the capital city sometimes forget (that’s me specifically) – that many of our countrymen are still poor. I can’t quite imagine how families (8.6% of households) can survive on less than RM1000 (USD280) a month. According to these figures, more than a third of households earn less than RM2000 a month. From another report, the average household income is RM3686.

My friend Peter Davis at UPM had written on Housing Affordability - using a 3-year income rule of thumb to gauge affordability. He did not have the household income figures at the time, so he made an estimate based on per capita GDP, and average family income came to only RM2000 per year and the average affordable house, RM72 000. We both agreed that this figure seemed too low – perhaps the statisticians were not able to capture the informal income that sustained the poor. Perhaps the statisticians put in more resources to get accurate figures for higher (and taxable) income groups!

So I updated Peter’s picture of Affordable Houses and compared it with our “opportunity surveys" in Pekan, Sungei Petani and Kuantan. This is it:



The figures from our narrow, non-random opportunity surveys were not bad. We can understand why we got lower figures for the cheapest homes – maybe for the poorest families actually owning a house is not realistic or is even a priority (the really important thing would be to secure better income); maybe, as Peter suspected, their informal sources income has not been taken into account.

We can also understand why we didn’t pick up the demand for houses in the high end. The simple reason was that we there are not many rich people milling around Government offices – civil servants are not exorbitantly paid, and the wealthy can delegate the chores that require going to these offices.

Anyway, imperfect as it may be, this is our view at the sort of house prices Malaysian families can afford. But what are developers are bringing on to the market? That is for the next post...

The Honeycomb Townhouse as a cheaper alternative to the Single-Storey Terrace House

Single storey terrace houses were the most common house-type for rural areas and small towns. In urban areas where land has become expensive, single storey houses are not common any more for new developments. Typically they occupied 20’X70’ plots of land and a few years ago would be priced at RM110,000 and below. However, they are expensive to build with a big area for footings and roof, a large party wall, and low density. Worse, they are perceived as less prestigious than two storey houses.



The Single storey terrace House: “IRIS GARDEN” priced about RM149,000 per unit at Bandar Saujana Putra in Selangor; from LBS Bina website

Now with building costs much higher than a few years ago, even developers in rural areas are shunning the single storey houses. The ones that get launched are also getting more expensive, leaving a gap in the supply of new houses in the RM80,000 to RM130,000 price range that used to be served by the single storey terrace houses.

There is a type of residential unit in Malaysia which is called a “townhouse”. Introduced in the 1980’s, it is actually a large terrace house with different owners on the ground and the first floors. This relatively new building type, is for people who can’t quite afford a terrace house, but do not want to live in flats.



The Terrace Townhouse: Townhouse at Bayu Permai in Rawang; from from GM Build website


We decided to come up with a Honeycomb version of the townhouse. What used to be a sextuplex house was divided into upstairs and downstairs units. These townhouses can fill an important niche in the market: while the usual kinds landed property – terrace, semi-detached and detached houses – are becoming more unaffordable for many people, they are not yet ready to accept living in apartments. At about 900sf built-up area, these can be an acceptable substitute for single–storey terrace houses. They are cheaper to build than single storey houses because they have more shared walls, floors and roof, and each unit takes up a smaller piece of land. I believe that they should be priced 10% cheaper than single storey houses.

The new Honeycomb Townhouse designs are an improvement on the terrace townhouses now already found in city areas. The terrace townhouses usually have only 22’ or 24’ frontages and this is too tight. The street fronting the townhouses has gate after gate along it: there is no space at all along the street for a second car, or indeed for any visitors. There is also too little external walls for proper ventilation and lighting for the rooms within them: the room layout gets very contorted as the various rooms compete for space for windows.



The Honeycomb Townhouse

The Honeycomb Townhouse has the advantage of being a corner unit with a garden to the side. There is more space for windows, and this makes the layout easier – there are enough external walls to provide windows for all the rooms. The Honeycomb Townhouse also has at least 30’ frontage. This means that after providing for the gates to the car-porches of the lower and upper floor units, there is still another 10’ to the side. In addition, the Honeycomb courtyard would mix quadruplex and sextuplex units, but only the sextuplex units are suitable for conversion to Townhouses (the quadruplex units have frontages which are too narrow). So the mixture of quadruplex and Townhouses becomes less crowded than a street of terrace townhouses.

There is another important advantage – the terrace townhouse has a rear garden for the ground floor unit but none at all for the first floor unit. But the Honeycomb Townhouse has a front garden for the upper floor unit and a rear garden for the lower ground unit!

Note for readers on Internet Explorer:
Sorry, my images did not appear in most of my posts: the images are now ok. To the person who complained - thanks very much!

Homes that more people can afford

In last week's "Housing in Hard Times", I suggested that there are some things that we in the housing industry can do - one is to study the supply side and see how to reduce costs: and we looked at Chou's wall and floor building system. The other is to examine the demand side. An important consideration must be to study what customers can afford.

Affordability is something that professional economists study and the most common measure of it relates the cost of housing to income.


from http://www.realtor.org/research/research/housinginx

The current measure in the US shows that though house prices are tumbling down fast, people's income (at least in aggregate) are still holding steady. So there is a silver lining to the current recession: housing in the US has become so much more affordable.

My friends at UPM and I took another view; and we came upon it almost by accident. It was a by-product of work we were doing with consumer preference surveys. Our aim was to gauge consumer acceptance of our new Honeycomb houses, and we were comparing it with conventional terrace houses.

At first we just compared a single type of house, but eventually we developed a wider range of Honeycomb house types including Honeycomb flats to compare with conventional products.

With a choice of houses that people could look at, we started by asking a simple, very direct question - what sort of house can you afford? Respondents were given a choice of answers: apartments from RM40 000, townhouses from RM80 000, double storey houses from RM 110 000, and so on.

With the answer given, the enumerator would show the brochures of the relevant Honeycomb and conventional house type, and then would go on with questions on the preferences of the respondent.

Beyond the issue of Honeycomb versus conventional houses, it was interesting to just look at what people said they could afford. These are the results from two surveys done in 2007 in district towns in Sungei Petani in the State of Kedah and Pekan in Pahang:





This sort of information should be useful for developers. Yet for a variety of reasons, this is not what developers are providing. They tend to be building houses that cost more than RM170 000. On top of that they build low cost houses that sell between RM35 000 to RM65 000 that Government rules require them to build. We will be looking at this situation later.

Kuala Lumpur's Commercial Area: Past and Future

This is Kuala Lumpur (KL) towards the end of the 19th Century when it was just a small town with not that many blocks of shop houses.



The main roads led north to Rawang, South-West to Klang, to South-East to Cheras, and West to Ampang.

According to Mr. Ho Chin Soon, "Pudu Village" was so far out of town that civil-servants going there could claim outstation allowance! Of course, Pudu is now considered as part of the inner-city.

The city's commercial activities expanded mainly along the trunk roads towards the North, South_West and South East. The corridor West towards Ampang grew mainly as a residential area.



That is until the 70's (when I was still in school), when private developers turned it into a high-rise commercial district - aptly called the "Golden Triangle". It's pretty built-up now.

As for the future, Ho mapped out the impediments to growth - the swathes of entrenched residential areas, Government owned land and reserves for cemeteries, parks, etc. And the areas left over are the likeliest places for the Golden Triangle to spill over to.



The maps are Ho Chin Soon's, see his excellent website at www.hochinsoon.com/

A Cheaper Way to Build

As an architect, I have been familiar with Industrialized Building systems since 1985. The promoters of the many systems all claim their particular method of construction to be superior in terms of cost, speed and quality. And I have learned to be sceptical.

But the system that most impressed me is based on a very simple concept and it was invented by a fellow Malaysian. I first used Chou Kan Yin’s system of tongue and groove blocks for Staff Housing in Universiti Industri Selangor, and the project was completed in 2003. The results were impressive!



Chou’s concrete blocks slide neatly into each other to form straight walls – something that our workers cannot do with bricks and mortar.



Steel bars for beams, stiffeners and lintels run through the hollows found in the block. Similarly, the wiring and pipes can be put in place without hacking, plus power point casings and water pipe outlets are pre-installed into special blocks at the factory.





With drawings that describe the location of every block, complete with the running of steel bars, wiring and concealed plumbing, building a house is like playing with Lego!

Chou has improved on wall system by adding a simple method for constructing upper floors without formwork. He is now manufacturing 2 inch thick planks that use pre-stressed concrete which use much less steel. These planks are craned into position before being topped up with another layer of reinforced concrete that is poured on site.



No formwork is required, and the floors become waterproof as the wet concrete seals the gaps between the planks.


Together, the wall and floor system produces an accurate building structure without mess. The walls and ceilings only need a thin layer of skim-coating to give a smooth finish. Tiles can also be easily laid on the floors or walls without having to repair the underlying surfaces.

Oh yes, about costs...

Compared to using reinforced concrete columns and beams, the most common method of construction in Malaysia, Chou's block system uses some 60% less steel. As for the slabs, overall his prestressed concrete planks, plus the lightly reinforced concrete topping, uses 40% less steel compared to normal reinforced concrete slabs.

Many system builders claim their system to be cheaper because their system is in some way involves a more efficient process. But its very difficult to quantify this sort of cost saving. In the case of Chou's building system, the savings are much easier to analyse: he just uses less steel.

Mostly, Industrialized Building Systems are used in big projects to take advantage of economies of scale. But the special thing about Chou’s system is that it can be used for even a small bungalow!

He calls his system CKY IBS... this is his website:
http://www.ckyibs.com/