Can more multi-storied buildings meet Qatar's housing needs?

Building taller buildings in areas where the population has been exploding is the only way to provide affordable housing to people and ensure that pressure on basic services does not grow beyond a limit, says the public representative body.

With not many sessions left in the current term of the Central Municipal Council (CMC), the representative body yesterday took up for debate two major issues that directly concern the public — traffic jams on city roads and lack of housing for the growing population.

Some CMC members said that the government should allow building upwards in areas like Al Miraikh, New Salata, Madinat Khalifa (north) and in neighbourhoods along D Ring Road to create more and affordable housing for both, citizens and expatriates.

The population in the above areas has been growing, so an effective solution is to have vertical development, which would, apart from creating more housing, also mean lower pressure on basic services, and less traffic congestion.

The CMC earlier expressed concern at the chaos on roads in Doha and other areas due to the increasing number of people and vehicles, and called on the interior ministry to set up a traffic engineering office to monitor vehicular traffic during peak hours.

The CMC members said that the situation was such that there were no peak and non-peak hours like before, since there are traffic snarls most of the time of the day.

The CMC was also intimated by Woqod (Qatar Fuel) that one of its members' recommendations to set up a fuel and service station with technical inspection facilities in Al Aqba area of Al Aqda had been conceded. [The Peninsula]