Housing Management & Maintenance - Essay Example

1. Planned Maintenance Issues 1. Type and Location of Building The building of interest is a block dwelling along with cottage type dwellings located in Salford, England. The block dwelling building will be concentrated on because it has some planned maintenance in the pipeline. The block dwelling is considered as part of social housing and is managed by a private registered provider of social housing (PRP). Another major reason for choosing this building is the fact that it represents common problems found with social housing especially in terms of typical maintenance issues that tend to arise. Figure 1 - Black Friars, Salford The building as well as the community is being managed by other members of the community who are responsible for administering the building and resolving its salient issues such as planned and unplanned maintenance. Generally the chosen building displays full occupancy all year around with most people belonging to the working class residing. Meanwhile some residents are part time students as well as part time workers (for gas stations, super store, take away and the like). 1.2. Materials / Technology Used in the Building The building is a typical skyscraper built along the beams and columns design principles. The entire building is composed of beams and columns that have been created using concrete as well as steel. Steel cages have been intertwined with poured cement in order to create the beams and columns. The floors have been constructed similarly although the composition of the steel frameworks or cages is far denser in the floors than in the beams and the columns. A few places in the building are also reinforced using structural steel although it is not highly visible. Adequate cladding in these areas ensures that the structural steel is not totally visible although some structural steel can be seen due to damaged cladding. The beams and columns are relied on to create different apartments such that all apartments have access to some form of ventilation in the shape of windows that are exposed to the outside environment. The matrix like structure created through the use of beams and columns is such that apartments exist on all the exposed faces of the building while hallways exist in their middle to provide access to the apartments. Within each typical apartment the external windows are all created using glass. These windows may stretch for entire man height in some areas while in others they are restricted to between 1.5 feet and 3 feet. The internals of the apartments are all done in concrete such as the beams and columns and the floors and roofs. The external shells of the apartments (the walls mostly) are done with brick work that has been covered with thin selections of cement. The internal walls of the apartments (that are not exposed outside the apartment) have been created using plywood and partitions composed of wood. These partitions have been ribbed using further pieces of wood to create small partitions in each wall. These partitions are all filled up using specialised insulation materials although in a few apartments that insulation material is showing through due to tear ups. The building has a complete internally housed heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) system that is connected all across the building. The HVAC apparatus and equipment is housed deep in the basement and cellar of the building with access restricted to maintenance crews and building administrators only. The heating systems are all powered using boilers (that are gas fired) located in the basement. These gas fired boilers are connected to a common water heating system that takes the heated water to radiators inside the apartments. Some radiators in a few apartments were also leaking causing leakage of heated water. Common hallways and stairways as well as lifts connect various parts of the building together and can be considered as commonly shared spaces. The building can be dated back to a few decades ago and the state of doors and sanitary fittings provide a clear reminder to this fact. The sanitary fittings in quite a few apartments were poorly maintained with growth of algae and fungi apparent though it is not up to the social housing providers to provide such maintenance. Overall the building is decent enough to look at although the amount of maintenance required for certain aspects such as plumbing is far too much. 1.3. Major Defects and Causes The common spaces of the building are in a state of disrepair. There is a constant need to clean up the common spaces inside the building because most of them are cluttered up and some have graffiti inscriptions as well which depict racial and sexual messages. In addition some jointing areas of the building that connect the major matrices of beams and columns are developing cracks and these cracks stretch for floors. The building maintenance planners are looking into options to maintain these problems using traditional as well as more modern approaches. In addition the cladding of the top roof of the building is also representing similar problems as some cracks have permeated the roof causing minor leakages into the underlying hallways. Certain scrapes of cement have also been removed from the external walls of the apartment that represent a major maintenance effort. Some portions have had cement removed for repairs while other segments represent a combination of poor prior maintenance as well as intentional removal in lieu of vandalism. The simplest repair option would be to re-cement the damaged walls but the local residents ought to be informed not to damage the building. Moreover the windows of some hallways are also broken with some pointing to vandalism as a cause of breakage. There is a consistent need to repair these aspects of the building as it represents aesthetic as well as community living issues. The HVAC system also needs major investment to make it work for a number of apartments. Some portions of the HVAC system are blocked out due to infrequent maintenance in the past while the tail end sections of the system hardly receive anything for air conditioning. Moreover the ducts are damaged in a few places and need repair. Some ducts are leaking while others have had insulation removed which in itself is a HSE problem because of the insulation flying around. Some radiators are also leaking in a few apartments along with some major pipelines that connect various sections of the building such as floors and hallways. These have been temporarily been plugged with whatever was available at hand but the maintenance planners are looking towards more permanent solutions such as using cold welding or taking a shutdown on the HVAC system and installing metal jackets through hot welding. The hallways of the building have estranged paint and require patchwork in certain places while in other areas cracks are visible at the joints of certain walls. A number of apartments also require replacement of broken windows. These issues must be dealt with through maintenance that is carried out in consultation with local social authorities. 1.4. Requirements of Social Housing Providers for Maintenance The Social Housing Providers must deal with the maintenance needed in social housing projects on their own on a localised scale. The planning, procurement and actual maintenance activities all need to be dealt with locally through active engagement of the tenants. Moreover the local social housing provider must be attuned to the ecology of the building or neighbourhood in question so as to anticipate the major maintenance required in the future. Also consistent maintenance issues such as graffiti in hallways and walls as well as vandalised windows must be dealt with by talking to residents so that such actions are not repeated time and again. 1.5. Planning of the Maintenance Program The Social Housing Providers must involve the community at large to create an effective maintenance program. The tenants are ideally relied upon to report housing problems that are then planned about for solutions. These considerations must be kept in view by the housing provider in order to develop a comprehensive maintenance program. Moreover the hosing provider must use past projections in order to determine the quantities, types and amounts of materials and people required in order to maintain a building. For example after a difficult winter it would be apparent that the building would require more maintenance so the housing provider must be prepared before hand to deal with such changes. 1.6. Customer Focus The customer plays an instrumental role in social housing because without the customer’s involvement the maintenance program cannot function. As highlighted above, a few maintenance problems spring from little else as non compliant customer behaviour. Proper awareness provided to the customer can ensure the sustainability of worked sections under the maintenance programs. The use of graffiti on walls or the removal of cemented sections as well as damaged glass windows all represent social problems more than maintenance problems. In order to rectify the situation, the maintenance planners will have to take into account the smaller and often estranged sections of residents such as teenagers as well as foreign immigrants. Customer focus is kept in place by involving the customer at all levels of social housing maintenance planning and management by allowing customers to run the organisations that take care of these issues. While the current social housing setup being used to run this building is based largely on community involvement but the community’s active part cannot be guaranteed in this case. The more “aware” sections of the community take an active part in the community meetings concerned with social housing as well as maintenance and other social problems but smaller groups are generally absent. As a consequence these sections are unable to report their maintenance problems in greater detail therefore leading to a greater maintenance backlog. Also some sections of the community are not fully aware of the methods in which social housing functions and they need to be made more aware. This in turn will reflect growing customer focus as individuals and sub cultures will be far more involved in the day to day functioning of the social housing project. This problem can be seen as stretching pervasively into the social housing setup so there is urgent need to boost customer focus by involving more and more groups through prodding their interests in the overall scenario. Customer focus is an important part of social housing as the customer is not only the end consumer but also in part the regulator for such kinds of housing. The contention is to involve the stakeholders (in this case largely the customers) such that they can handle the day to day affairs with ease. In effect these measures are designed to provide sustainability to the overall social housing framework. The customers who are elected or nominated by others to run the social housing setup are members of the subject community and are hence far more aware of common problems as well as pitfalls. The presence of such localised and on hand expertise that is groomed over the years provides social housing with an exacting customer focus that is enhanced over time with greater interactions amongst members and customers alike. 2. Bibliography Boyd, N., 1982. Josephine Butler, Octavia Hill, Florence Nightingale. Three Victorian women who changed their world. London: Macmillan. Communities and Local Government, 2011. Residential Tenant Training. [Online] Department for Communities and Local Government Available at: HYPERLINK "http://www.communities.gov.uk/documents/housing/pdf/1921400.pdf" http://www.communities.gov.uk/documents/housing/pdf/1921400.pdf [Accessed 18 November 2011]. Communities and Local Government, 2011. Tenant empowerment. [Online] Available at: HYPERLINK "http://www.communities.gov.uk/housing/socialhousing/tenantempowerment/" http://www.communities.gov.uk/housing/socialhousing/tenantempowerment/ [Accessed 18 November 2011]. Cranwell, K., 2001. 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