| Public housing in Peninsular Malaysia is grossly inadequate in the face of socio-economic problems characteristic of most urban societies in developing economies. The New Economic Policy that seeks to restructure Malaysian society is expected to add new urgency and increased political attention for greater effort in public housing. The chief reasons for limited performance in the past, as perceived by this study, are the absence of adequately detailed housing policy and dynamic housing institutions to plan for and implement housing programs.;The evaluation of policies and programs supports the hypothesis that the housing policy definition and development is disjointed, fragmentary and incoherent, that there is a wide performance gap between policies and programs, that allocation of funds for public housing has been hampered by other national priorities seeking to allocate funds for the socio-economic improvement of the Malay population in the rural sector, that attention received by public housing is mostly within the context of programatic planning of agencies outside the control of the Ministry of Housing and Local Government, and that the process of program formulation and location is over politicised to the extent, sometimes, of not being related to the local need for such housing.;The responses to questionnaires, constructed on the principal institution building variables as identified by the literature survey, yielded fourteen factors that must be noted in any future institution building for public housing in Malaysia. Taking note of this the study then goes on to offer: (a) a framework for housing policy formulation and (b) an institutional model for public housing in Malaysia.;The focus of this study is on three areas: (1) evaluation of Malaysian public housing policies, programs and finance since World War II, (2) review of the empirical literature on institution building and its significance for Malaysian public housing institutions, and (3) housing policy formulation model and institutional model to implement public housing. |
