High-rise apartments vulnerable, lack risk-mitigation measures

Although country’s housing sector has gradually evolved into an organized business sector over the years, urban development experts and planners raised concerns over various housing products, particularly high-rise buildings, referring to them as prone to risks.
Speaking at an interaction on ‘High-Rise Apartments: Its Feasibility and Contextual Reality’, they raised concern over unplanned development of high-rise buildings and poor regulation and monitoring by the government, saying that such a laxness by the regulator has enabled the companies to escape even as they hand over risk prone products to the customers.
“High-rise apartments in Kathmandu are simply not feasible. The Valley can support only mid- and low-rise apartments,” Arun Dev Pant, architect at Design Cell, a private consultancy firm, said.
Pant disagreed with the views of developers and planners who have been saying that development of high-rises was one of the most reliable ways to manage limitations of land availability and population in the Kathmandu valley.
“Our present approach toward housing sector is wrong because we have not even made apartments affordable for middle-income groups,” Pant said, referring to the prices the developers are charging for the apartments.
Developers like Om Rajbhandary, the chairman and CEO of The Comfort Housing, and senior government officials agreed.
Rajbhandary said it was high time for the government and the private developers to examine whether the high-rise apartments are feasible in Kathmandu. “Everyone is developing high-rise apartments in Kathmandu. But we need to do a serious homework before jumping into it,” Rajbhandary said.
Tulsi Prasad Sitaula, secretary at the Ministry of Physical Planning, Works and Transport Management (MoPPWTM) echoed experts’ concern over safety of the apartments built in the recent years.
“During an inspection of some apartments last year, we discovered negligence by developers on several fronts, including safety measures like lack of fire exits and other arrangements,” he stated.
He admitted weakness on the part of the regulator. “The government actually started monitoring the sector only recently. But that should not have been a reason for the developers to skip the basic safety measures that affect customers lives directly,” he said.
Sitaula attributed weak coordination among different government agencies responsible for regulation of housing for the problems in the sector. He, however, committed to set up mechanism to beef up coordination among different government agencies.