Before Iran’s new president Ebrahim Raisi took office, he promised to build one million housings and decrease the number of homeless people, which has become one of the major problems for the country especially for women who have no roof over their heads.
According to a plan called production leap and housing supply, the government is obliged to build one million houses in a year in urban and rural areas.
But many officials are criticizing this plan because the government lacks the needed financial resources to execute such a plan.
The first reason for new housings is the issue of compensating for the shortage of housing against the number of households in the country. According to the latest census of population and housing, while the number of households in the country was reported to be 24.196 million households, the number of housing units in the country was 22.825 million houses.
This means that in the current situation, some households in the country live jointly in a housing unit or their place of residence cannot be referred to as housing such as those in the outskirts of the cities, where on numerous occasions the regime has attacked its residents in the past years and destroyed their self-made housings. So, for each household to have 1 housing unit, the country’s housing market is facing a shortage of 1.371 million shelters.
The second reason for housing demands is due to new marriages. In the last ten years, an average of 783,000 marriages have occurred, it can be said that the housing market must meet this number of new demands, but due to the negligence of the government, the number of marriages has decreased which has created many social challenges for the country.
The third reason for new housing is due to the renovation and rehabilitation of worn-out areas. According to surveys conducted by the Ministry of Roads and Urban Development in 2013 to revise the housing master plan, more than 11.2 million people currently live in 76.4 thousand hectares of deteriorated urban areas in Iran.
Adding to this the probability of earthquakes is increasing the importance of this issue, especially in the capital, that in any major earthquake the number of casualties would exceed millions. It can be said that an average of 21% of the country’s housing units is in a worn-out region.
Referring to the existing statistics indicates that a minimum estimate of 5 million old urban housing units needs to be rebuilt. Besides the worn-out urban regions, the share of non-resistant housing units in the country’s villages is more worrying.
Currently, there are more than 3.2 million non-resistant rural units in the country. As a result, according to the statistics, there are a total of 8 million housing units in the country that need to be rebuilt by 2026.
Over the past four decades, more than 100,000 villages have been destroyed in the country, and many of the country’s population centers have collapsed and the population is concentrated mostly in the capital and metropolises. Many border areas are haunted.
The last reason for new constructions is the debate of natural housing reserves. To regulate the supply and demand market, many countries around the world must always anticipate several uninhabited housing units to respond to the weaknesses caused by the disproportionate distribution of residential units as well as the need for office and commercial units.
Therefore, it seems that about 600,000 units should be planned and constructed as a market reserve in 10 years. But many times, the officials claimed that many empty houses can be considered as the country’s housing reserve.
But the reality is that these units are mostly not habitable for the public because there are too luxurious and expensive or are in tourist areas.
The survey of resource statistics on the need to build a residential unit shows that to solve the problem of housing supply in the country by 2026, it is necessary to produce a total of 22 million housing units in the country from 2016 and within 10 years. Therefore, the country’s real need is to produce 2.2 million units per year, and building 1 million homes per year cannot solve the housing market problem.
