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Established in 2006 as a Community of Reality

Welcome to the Neno's Place!

Neno's Place Established in 2006 as a Community of Reality


Neno

I can be reached by phone or text 8am-7pm cst 972-768-9772 or, once joining the board I can be reached by a (PM) Private Message.

Established in 2006 as a Community of Reality

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Established in 2006 as a Community of Reality

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    Housing Crisis in Iraq: “Ambitious” Government Plans and Fears of Monopoly

    Rocky
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    • Post n°1

    Housing Crisis in Iraq: “Ambitious” Government Plans and Fears of Monopoly Empty Housing Crisis in Iraq: “Ambitious” Government Plans and Fears of Monopoly

    Post by Rocky Fri 27 Sep 2024, 6:55 am

    Housing Crisis in Iraq: “Ambitious” Government Plans and Fears of Monopoly
    • Time: 2024/09/27 08:16:01
       
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    {Local: Al Furat News} Iraq has suffered, and continues to suffer, from a major housing crisis over the past years, in light of the abundance of government projects to solve it, but most of these projects do not reach the implementation stage, and if they do, most of them are delayed. However, if the government changes, they are forgotten.
    By electronically entering the “Housing Projects” box in the list of projects of the Ministry of Construction, Housing, Municipalities and Public Works, the browser will notice the phrase “The project is suspended” at the bottom of many of the graphs of the projects undertaken by the Ministry. 
    There are also several projects that are still in progress, and others that have been largely completed.
    The Ministry of Reconstruction is one of several entities implementing reconstruction and housing plans in Iraq. It now has an ambitious plan, and has set a time frame for its completion by 2030, to contribute to addressing the housing problem, the solution of which requires the completion of at least three million housing units.
    Engineer Nabil Al-Saffar, the media spokesman for the Ministry of Construction and Housing in the government of Prime Minister Mohammed Shia Al-Sudani, says that only five housing projects have been completed out of 49 projects launched over the past years in various Iraqi governorates.
    Regarding the stalled projects, Al-Saffar says, “We are cooperating with the governorates to refer them for investment,” or to return the companies that were implementing them to work on them again, even if they provide a small portion of the housing units, which may alleviate the crisis.
    He pointed out that some projects had been halted due to the circumstances that Iraq had gone through, "especially in the provinces that had suffered from terrorism."
    New solutions to the housing crisis in Iraq
    In June 2023, Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani approved announcing investment opportunities to build new residential cities, namely Al-Jawahiri City in the Abu Ghraib area of ​​the capital, Baghdad, Karbala Banks in Karbala Governorate, New Fallujah in Anbar Governorate, Al-Janain in Babil Governorate, and Al-Ghazlani in Nineveh Governorate.
    In a later statement by Al-Sudani, he said that the city of Ali Al-Wardi (named after the Iraqi sociologist) will be “the largest city in the history of the Iraqi state.”
    Last June, the head of the Parliamentary Services and Reconstruction Committee, Ali Al-Hamidawi, said that the government’s reconstruction plan includes the establishment of 25 residential cities, as Iraq needs between 3 and 4 million housing units to solve the housing crisis.
    These cities will be implemented in stages, as Al-Saffar says, “We have started implementing five cities as a first generation, and this will provide us with approximately 220,000 housing units. The second generation will include six cities, and will provide us with approximately 100 housing units as a first stage.”
    The number is much larger than these figures, according to Al-Saffar, but these 11 cities “have been fully studied and planned for implementation in the near term.”
    In the long term, the 15 residential cities included in the government programme are expected to provide between 750,000 and one million housing units over the next ten years, Al-Saffar continues.
    The cities that the Ministry of Construction and Housing has begun implementing, as Al-Saffar says, will include more than 200,000 housing units: “Al-Jawahiri City, 30,000 housing units and 10,000 serviced plots of land, Ali Al-Wardi (120,000 housing units), Al-Ghazlani (28,000), Dafāf Karbala (21,000), and Al-Janain (12,000).”
    The second phase will include the implementation of cities in the governorates of Najaf, Wasit, Maysan, Dhi Qar, Muthanna and Salah al-Din, and they will be announced as investment opportunities.
    Target Segments
    State-supported housing projects target various social segments, most of whom are low-income and poor people who cannot afford to buy housing units due to the high cost and difficult lending conditions in Iraq.
    These categories include “social welfare recipients, martyrs’ families in a number of ministries, and widows,” according to Al-Saffar.
    He pointed out that the government decided to add the "unemployed youth segment" during a meeting held on Tuesday, and in this context a percentage of housing units in new cities will be allocated.
    As for determining the beneficiaries from all these groups, this will be done in cooperation with the relevant authorities, such as the Ministry of Labor, the Ministry of Defense, the Ministry of Interior, and the Ministry of Migration and Displacement. Later, the units will be distributed among them in specific proportions.
    Editor-in-Chief of the Iraqi newspaper Al-Eqtisadiah, Karim Al-Helou, summarized the most prominent objections and observations about the new housing projects, including that the conditions for obtaining these units were not fair to families with limited income. In his opinion, the government allowed everyone to buy units in these complexes and did not give priority to those who do not own homes.
    Al-Hilu says this has allowed merchants, businessmen and investors to buy more properties, leading to an abnormal increase in the prices of these residential units, which now range between 150 million Iraqi dinars (about $115,000) and 400 million dinars (about $306,000). Prices that Al-Hilu says are more expensive than New York and Washington.
    Nature of investment and state share
    The spokesman for the Ministry of Construction and Housing, Al-Saffar, says that the nature of the investment will differ with the new cities, as “the state will obtain a share in return for the lands granted as an investment. A portion of the residential units will be distributed at prices subsidized by the government, and the other portion, there is a trend for the government to bear 50 percent of the value of the residential unit and the remaining 50 percent will be borne by the beneficiaries through soft loans that are paid in installments over a period of 20 years.”
    The remaining units will be sold by the investor at controlled prices that will be fixed in the feasibility study, and will be “certainly lower than the prices in current investment complexes,” Al-Saffar continues.
    But Al-Halou downplayed the effectiveness of the government's steps, due to "corruption in the mechanisms of selling residential units in investment projects built on state-owned lands." He added that these loopholes in the government's housing plans have been an obstacle for employees and workers to achieve their dream of buying a property or housing. 
    Last year, the Iraqi Center for Political and Economic Studies said that “the high prices in residential and commercial areas, which exceed those in London and Dubai by more than $12,000 per square meter, are due to the great corruption in real estate sales.”
    In May 2023, the Iraqi Parliamentary Integrity Committee stated that it had opened a file on state real estate to show how it was sold and rented in previous years.
    In April 2023, the Iraqi Ministry of Justice announced the implementation of its program to protect public funds and recover stolen funds, and confirmed the creation of a division in the Real Estate Registration Department to follow up on money laundering crimes with the relevant authorities, according to local media.
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