Non-Governed-Sprawl Generates Costly Mistakes..!!
More structural Governance should control the activities of the Real Estate Developers; who by default seek reduction of cost; which subsequently goes down the ladder to materials, supplies and sub-contractors..
FM was structured in UK & USA 1960th, based on a long history of technical. operational and importantly legal transactions of janitors and property managers.. In Dubai 2000 was the 1st Arabian launch.. There is a learning curve for all stakeholders; despite the lucrative profits.. This case should alarm authorities that there are lots to be done..!
Not the Codes and ISO to rule, but biz culture and visionary regulations.. it will take time to mature..
Unless the ration of 1:5:200 is epistemically settled in FM, RE & Urban Development.. Immaturity of these businesses will continue as nightmares..!! While the other folks will continue wondering and laughing..!! Not degrees and certifications, but evolution of the professional and civic sectors..
by
Mazhar Farooqui
Published: Mon 4 Jul 2022, 6:35 PM
https://www.khaleejtimes.com/property/dubai-10-year-old-buildings-face-demolition-over-400-homeowners-uncertain-about-future
Over 400 homeowners of the barely 10-year-old Mayaza 3 and Mazaya
4 residential buildings in Queue Point, Liwan, have been told that they are
living in their apartments at their own risk.
Residents of the buildings in Dubai were informed about this
through an email notification last month after an expert committee found that
their buildings suffer from a host of serious issues, including structural
damage and corrosion.
In the wake of the findings, sale of apartments, issuance of new
lease agreements and registration of tenancy contracts (Ejari) have been
suspended in the buildings till further notice.
Kaizen Owner Association Management Services, the company managing
the property, said they involved government authorities after residents
complained about eroded floors, water leakage and cracks.
A committee was subsequently formed in November last year by Dubai
Land Department (DLD) and developer Al Mazaya Real Estate to assess the
buildings, identify the cause of the damage and propose solutions.
Defining the Personal Interests of Stakeholders is the most critical to determine the approaches to them, which shall be precisely interpreted in Planning, Reporting and Closing
A directed team will deliver value within the constraints established by management.
A self-organizing team, unencumbered by micro-management, will deliver incremental and unexpected value that could not have been envisioned.
What's the takeaway for change management?
Change Agents often act as managers, providing constraints and setting direction for a group of stakeholders on how they will change via the change plan and activities.
Instead, try allowing certain stakeholder groups to self-organize around the end-goal.
Provide vision and direction and then act as a coach, supporting the stakeholders in their journey.
Empower stakeholders to co-create their change journey and then pull activities and events when they are ready.
You'll be amazed at the unexpected value that is unlocked.
In our Lean Change Agent workshop, we teach Change Agents how to leverage the power of Agile frameworks and principles to enable and empower stakeholders to self-organize around the change.
Explore the Lean Change Agent workshop here: https://idealeap.com/lean-change
Corviale, Rome, one of the longest single residential building, 1 kilometer in length, housing around 8000 people. (1970s).
The building was created to be a self-sufficient experiment of social housing with stores, services, medical clinics, etc. It was designed to be a world of its own.
Poor Neighborhoods Make the Best Investments
This is not a social justice argument. I'm not writing this post
to shame you into taking some altruistic action for the greater good. What I'm
going to present here is pure dollars and cents.
Consider the two following investment options
for your personal portfolio:
Option
A: Invest in a handful of very large entities. Each comes with a
lot of hype yet has a track record of under performing, even dramatically
losing money. A look at peer entities shows a consistent track record of
failure and decline over time.
Option
B: Investment in an expansive portfolio of hundreds to thousands of
small to mid-sized entities. None of these have much hype or prestige
associated with them. While collectively they have a consistent track record of
success, individual entities within the portfolio may be a spectacular boom or
a total failure.
A few prestige companies with a long track
record of failure or a large number of small companies, each with boom or bust
potential but with a general upward trajectory?
It's clear that the preferred option is B.
Spreading your money out over many small different investments gives you a
large hedge against risk (i.e. don't put all your eggs in one basket). While
each small investment could be a bust, it could also boom; broad diversification
evens out the risk. In general, the gains over time are positive, although not
flashy. There is significant upside potential with little downside risk, the
perfect portfolio mix for the prudent investor. And you're a prudent investor,
not some Wolf of Wall Street something-for-nothing.
Yesterday I wrote about Lafayette, Louisiana,
a perfectly normal American city that shares the basic development pattern most
of you have in the places you live. I included a map that shows parts of the
city that were profitable -- where the city collects more revenue than is
spends -- and parts of the city that were being operated at a loss, where the
long term expenditures are greater than the revenue stream.
I've (rather crudely -- I'm not a graphics pro) updated that map
to show the parts of town generally full of residences occupied by poor people
and parts of town with residences occupied by those that are more affluent. I
used the terms "poor" and "affluent" rather loosely. There
is no study that breaks this down and we don't have underlying data. That being
said, when we were looking for an AirBnB to stay in, we were told to stay away
from the neighborhoods marked as "poor" as they are dangerous. When
we spoke to law enforcement as part of our study, we received similar insights.
A look at Zillow, backed up with an eye test, also suggests that the areas
marked poor are indeed occupied by people that are, on average, significantly
poorer than those people living in the areas marked affluent.
What is obvious here is that the poor neighborhoods are
profitable while the affluent neighborhoods are not. Throughout the poor
neighborhoods, the city is -- TODAY -- bringing in more revenue than they will
spend to maintain the neighborhood, and that's assuming they actually invest
the money to maintain the neighborhood (which they have not been). If they fail
to maintain the neighborhood, the profit margins will be even higher.
This might strike some of you as surprising,
yet it is important to understand that it is a consistent feature we see
revealed in city after city after city all over North America. Poor
neighborhoods subsidize the affluent; it is a ubiquitous condition of the
American development pattern.
As an example, consider what is probably our most famous case
study here at Strong Towns, the Taco John's in my hometown of Brainerd,
Minnesota, as described in "The Cost of Auto Orientation."
The block on the left has been labeled as blight. It's run down and
neglected. The block on the right -- same size, same amount of public
infrastructure, just a different development approach -- looks shiny and new.
Poor versus affluent. The cost to the city is the same but the poor
block is worth 78% more, and pays 78% more taxes, than the affluent block.
We see this trend everywhere we've done a model. On a per acre
basis, neighborhoods that tend to be poor also tend to pay more taxes and cost
less to provide services to than their more affluent counterparts.
How is this possible? Some of my planner
colleagues will say it is density, but I've long rejected that simplistic
explanation. There is a lot more to it than a simple division
problem. For example, in Lafayette those poor neighborhoods tend to have narrower
streets, which cost less. The houses tend to be older and so they also tend to
occupy the high ground, which was the cheapest place to build way back then
(free, natural drainage). The high ground also makes sewer service more
affordable; no expensive pumps to operate and maintain. I could go on, but you
get the point. The original builders of Lafayette were poor themselves and,
even where they weren't, they were culturally pretty frugal. Their building
tradition, developed over thousands of years,
built as much wealth as possible at the lowest cost with the least long term
risk.
So why does this make poor neighborhoods the
best investment today? There are three reasons.
First, in comparison, the
other investment opportunities are terrible. That map of Lafayette
tells a compelling story about the financial failure of all those residential
subdivisions with the wide lots, curvy streets and cul-de-sacs. They are
financial losers right now and, understanding modern zoning as well as the
expectations of the people who have bought there, there is little hope of
turning that around. These places are built all at once to a finished state.
Today is peak wealth; it's all downhill from here, regardless of how much
public investment is made.
Second, it won't take
much to see consistently large returns. In these poor
neighborhoods, we're not talking about taking $50,000 homes and making them
into $250,000 homes. Those kind of projects are hit-and-miss risky and not
really scalable anyway. What we're really talking about is taking a
neighborhood of $50,000 homes and making them $55,000 homes. That's a solid 10%
increase in the tax base. It's wealth that is shared throughout the
neighborhood. It's a real gain -- not an illusion -- that is more likely to
persist than some kind of one-off project. And it's repeatable. We can nurture
3-5% annual returns out of these depressed neighborhoods for a long, long time.
(And, by the way, one quick diversion from dollars and cents....this is also
how you avoid displacement and ensure that the gains in wealth actually go to
the poor who are responsible for it.)
Finally, the type of
investments that these neighborhoods need in order to experience consistent
3-5% returns over time are very small and low risk. We're
talking about things like putting in street trees, painting crosswalks, patching
sidewalks, and making changes to zoning regulations to provide more flexibility
for neighborhood businesses, accessory apartments and parking. If we try some
things and they don't work, we don't lose much because they don't cost much. We
learn from our small failures and try something else. This is the approach we
described in our Neighborhoods First report,
a way of building we've now seen repeated in cities like Austin, Memphis and
Pittsburgh. We also shared some other ideas last week in Five Low Cost Ideas to Make Your City Wealthier.
American cities can make low risk, high returning investments
while improving the quality of life for people, particularly those who have not
benefited from the current approach. That is the essence of a prudent, Strong
Towns approach. It's critical we get started now because we need strong cities
if we are to have a truly strong America.
Charles Marohn—known as “Chuck” to friends and colleagues—is the founder and president of Strong Towns. He is a land use planner and (retired) professional engineer with decades of experience. He holds a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering and a Master of Urban and Regional Planning, both from the University of Minnesota.
Marohn is the author of Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity (Wiley, 2019) and Confessions of a Recovering Engineer: Transportation for a Strong Town (Wiley 2021). He hosts the Strong Towns Podcast and is a primary writer for Strong Towns’ web content. He has presented Strong Towns concepts in hundreds of cities and towns across North America.
The inefficient administrators and managers is the unspoken threat for the metro-developments; whereas details of plans, decisions and programs hinder both sustainability and added-value of the progression. Therefore; transformation is likely negative within these developing countries; whereas governance, transparency and accountability are hard to trace. It is petty; how their professionals and many academics are trapped between stealth-immature knowledge and wide-spread bureaucratic corruption. Elite graduates do not join the public service..! They are not engaged in decision making process..! It is not a privilege to recognize any wrong doing in the urban process; which is impossible to revert or correct..!
إن الإداريين والمديرين غير الأكفاء هم التهديد غير المعلن لتطورات المترو ؛ بينما تعيق تفاصيل الخطط والقرارات والبرامج كلاً من الاستدامة والقيمة المضافة للتقدم
وبالتالي؛ من المحتمل أن يكون التحول سلبيًا داخل هذه البلدان النامية ؛ في حين يصعب تتبع الحوكمة والشفافية والمساءلة. إنه تافه. كيف أن مهنييهم والعديد من الأكاديميين محاصرون بين المعرفة الخفية غير الناضجة والفساد البيروقراطي واسع الانتشار.
خريجو النخبة لا يلتحقون بالخدمة العامة
هم لا يشاركون في عملية صنع القرار
ليس من الامتياز الاعتراف بأي خطأ في العملية الحضرية ؛ وهو ما يستحيل التراجع عنه أو تصحيحه
An important step to understanding why people are not doing something is to get an idea of what is stopping them. There are different models to help you understand why people are not doing a certain behavior. One of them is the B-COM model.
B-COM stands for Behavior-Capability, Opportunity, Motivation. This can really help us in designing better solutions. I include a description of the model from a session I recently provided.
Munther Albusaidi, PhD
A management consultant with expertise in finance, accounting, management and behavioral economics
