Affordable housing: Dubai is making room

Where you live affects everything in your life — from where you work, to who your friends are, to how many kids you can have and so on.

- BY SAMEER LAKHANI

Housing can be traced back to most of the problems facing society, and where there are housing shortages, the problem of artificial scarcity rears its head in the form of higher prices, which in turn affects things like birthrates and lower economic growth.

Counter-intuitively, studies have shown that higher density actually reduces the problem of overcrowding, as a greater number of apartments allows for greater numbers of residents to stay in a desired locality rather than cramming into one apartment.

So, the silver bullet is greater supply, the one variable that can at least partially offset higher prices, especially in economies that are built more and more on intangible capital, a direction that Dubai and the UAE is moving towards.

More homes, higher productivity

This increased supply, apart from being a magnet for attracting capital and talent, serves another critical purpose: it increases productivity.