Supportive Environment for Housing Co-Operatives in the Context of the “Current Housing Affordability” in Nairobi County, Kenya

Abstract

Governments have recognised the contribution of housing co-operatives towards alleviating housing shortage while contributing to the social economic, cultural and political progression of their community and nation at large. This has prompted a need for deeper understanding of supportive environment for housing co-operatives in provision of affordable housing. Specifically, the paper aimed to determine the supportive environment for housing co-operatives and examine the relationship between supportive environment for housing co-operatives and housing affordability. The paper adopted cross sectional research design employing both quantitative and qualitative approach. Multistage sampling technique was used to select the 387 members from the 35 housing co-operatives selected. The collected data were analysed with both inferential and descriptive statistics, the descriptive statistics include frequency, simple percentage and mean, while inferential statistics used was multiple regression analysis. Test of hypotheses were analysed through mixed effect model and correlation analysis. The finding reveals that policy and legislative, collaboration and partnerships had a significant effect on housing affordability with P-value of 0.016 and 0.010 respectively. On the other hand support services had insignificant effect on housing affordability with P-value of 0.637 which is greater than 0.05. The study concludes that it’s ultimately the sole responsibility of government to create conducive environment for housing co-operatives to thrive, however not to the extent of interfering with its independence. The study recommends that the state department of co-operatives should organise workshop for stakeholders to participate in reformulating and restructuring of the current legislative and policy framework.