Assessment of Condominium Housing: Fitness to the Intended Purpose: The Case of Mekelle City

Mekelle is a city which needs to construct 38,000 houses up to 2015 to solve the accumulated and emerging housing problem. As a result, the government has established IHDP and planned to construct 14,647 condominium houses. However, comparatively low and middle income respondents were not able or willing to purchase it. This paper aims at assessing fitness to the intended purpose of the condominium houses constructed in the first cycle. To realize the objectives of the study, semi-structured questionnaire was administered to 188 respondents. Furthermore, interviews, focus group discussions were used as data collection tools and secondary sources were used as data sources. And then data outputs were produced using SPSS version-16. The finding indicates that, the income of the residents and the costs of each condominium units were the main factors that determine the affordability of the condominium houses. Accordingly, the condominium units were affordable only for 34(18.1%) of the respondents. In addition to this, most of the respondents didn’t have saving practice and get trouble to finance the down payment from different sources. Moreover, the respondents were not well informed about the process, advantages and costs of the condominium houses. As a result the provision of condominium houses became tiresome.