Budget Builds: Affordable Home Solutions.

Affordable housing is becoming an increasing issue in New Zealand as current house prices are increasing expeditiously, severely affecting first home buyers with no pre-existing assets. The purpose of this paper is to rethink the way we inhabit homes by examining developing countries approaches of incremental and self-help construction to generate affordable solutions. Although successful incremental designs have been reached in a third world approach, little research shows how these ideas can benefit first home buyers in a first world context with aid from prefabrication. This paper investigates the specific context of New Zealand through a digital and physical experimental approach of design.

The resulting design proposal develops expandable homes that allow inexperienced users access to engage in self-help building methods to achieve cost reductions. Design considerations are influenced by affordability, construction, and income to develop a preliminary understanding on how the combination of incremental and self-help techniques could prove an affordable platform for first home buyers.

Analysis of the developed design highlights that a cost-effective outcome is not possible through standard forms of prefabrication. As the material and manufacturing processes chosen to allow engagement of inexperienced users was not cost-effective, additional research is found to be needed to generate an alternative solution.