5 Million People Register in Iran’s Housing System; Road Minister: Most Are Renters or Living on Rooftops

Iran’s Road and Urban Development Minister stated that the country needs 10 million new housing units, and announced that the number of people who have remained single due to financial problems and lack of housing exceeds 8 million.

Rostam Qasemi announced that 5 million people have so far registered in the “Housing Movement” system and said: “The majority of these individuals are either renters or living on rooftops, and certainly the number of people without housing is more than this, while there are more than two million empty houses in the country.”

Stating that the biggest issue in housing construction is the limitation of land, he promised: “Within four years, we will proceed to build four million units.”

Earlier, Mojtaba Yousefi, a member of the parliament’s construction commission, announced the population of Iran’s marginalized settlements as 20 million people, or about one-quarter of the country’s population, and said that despite 800,000 marriages annually, the population of renters is constantly increasing.

According to the official report of Iran’s Central Bank, housing rent in Tehran in December 2021 grew 50.7 percent and in all urban areas 54 percent compared to December of the previous year.

Uncontrolled rent increases in Iran have spread to various cities. ILNA news agency in the final days of 2021 reported “astronomical” rental prices in Urmia that have made the city uninhabitable for workers and the “weak” class of society, with people “taking refuge in the margins.”

Earlier, Navid Jamshidi, an economic analyst, referring to the thirteenth government’s domestic economic policies and the “super housing crisis,” told the Farsi service of Voice of America that the claim of building one million housing units a year is ridiculous and impossible given the economic situation and budget deficit that the gentlemen themselves are forecasting at least 400 trillion tomans for this year.

According to this analyst, Iran’s issues are “neither going to see any special developments in economic diplomacy, nor in domestic economy,” and “this housing issue itself is a melon peel that they have thrown under the feet of Ebrahim Raisi and his friends.”

Source: Voice of America