Strong regulatory mechanism for housing demanded

KARACHI, May 26, 2011 (PPI): In stamping out the inequitable distribution of land, government must devise a proper mechanism such as ‘housing price index’ to regulate and control the prices of houses as overall population of the country is increasing at 2.6% while urban settlement is growing at 4.7% annually.

In this scenario, housing needed to evolve as a corresponding measure. This was stated by chairman Department of Architecture and Planning, NED University Dr. Noman Ahmed during his presentation on ‘Housing Crisis in Pakistan’ at Urban Resource Centre on Wednesday evening. He said the 45% of the population in Urban Sindh and 50% in Urban Punjab lives in one room, while 53% have access to waters sources in urbanized areas of the country.

“Keeping in view such a dismal situation, poor and downtrodden segment of the society can only dream of acquiring the housing facilities,” he said.

He said Karachi had become an urban region with 55% of the population is living in unplanned localities. “Everybody can set a house price as per his choice; nobody can prevent him from doing as there is no law in effect”

Discussing the housing policy measures taken by the government since independence, he said the Ministry of Rehabilitation was established in 1949 for addressing the housing issues, while subsequently the government started to make five-year housing plans.

In its first plan of 1955-60, the major emphasis was laid on preparing housing schemes and 10% of the public service spending was allocated for that purpose. For next five years, the policies remained same. In the plan of 1960-65, the private sector was encouraged to participate in housing development as government also exempted them of the tax payment.

The scenario was changed from 1970-80, when government started making drastic cuts in its spending on housing as no profit was gained since its inception. From 1993-98, government began land acquisition program with local agencies that also yielded no productive results.

Citing failures of all these policies, he said the uncontrolled housing delivery was the central reason as no target was set in doling out the land. In also begets the unfair distribution.

Second reason, he said, was the national bank refrained from giving loans to poor segment saying it can’t bear the burden of more defaulters. However, Dr. Noman mentioned that the 97% of the previous defaulters were not poor. He made this point criticizing the misjudgement of bank with regard to poor.

Moving on with his rational, he said the allocation of inappropriate locations for lands was another mistake made by the government during implementation of such housing policies. “How people can utilize a land for housing purpose at the far-off location where no existence of human settlement is seen”

Dr. Noman said it was a right time to restructure the ‘House Building Finance Commission’, besides introducing ‘community mortgage program’ or ‘housing credit assistance to public’ so that it would remove the gap of have and have not between the poor and rich.

“Investment in housing as a real estate enterprise can be greatly enhanced if rental housing schemes are reformed,” he said.

He mentioned that the community housing projects in the country was running successfully such as Parsis and Christians due to strong mutual trust between them. Such project can’t flourish at a broader level unless the mistrust of communities for government is eradicated, Dr. Noman added.