Tarek Ali Fadaak, a member of the Shoura Council, said the Kingdom is in need of 143,000 housing units annually.
Fadaak said the housing sector needed long-term financing while the real estate sector’s needs are short-term.
The Shoura member also stressed the need to have a clear understanding of all aspects of a problem in order to find suitable solutions for it. “For instance,” he said, “the limited income group is not clearly defined.”
He commended the “constructive steps” taken to end the housing problem with the 500,000-unit free housing project ordered by Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Abdullah and the adoption of a housing strategy that seeks to facilitate every citizen owning a house, in addition to the launch of the mortgage law and the Real Estate Development Fund facility that provides loans up to SR 500,000 to an individual looking to buy a house.
By contrast, Tunisia’s Housing Minister Shahida Faraj Bouraoui said in her address to the forum: “The Tunisian government’s efforts in the housing sector focuses on encouraging private companies to invest in the housing sector on the one hand and mounting pressure on the companies to reduce cost and ensure quality on the other.”
She added that the country set up a national agency for housing, which develops land for construction. The Tunisian Real Estate Corporation for Housing, on the other hand, focuses on expensive houses with the aim of making up for the losses incurred by low-cost housing projects, she said. The country has also enacted a number of laws to simplify complicated housing formalities, she added.
Jaime Lerner, former governor of the state of Parana, Brazil, warned decision makers that their housing strategies should consider people’s tastes or else the projects would become a waste of capital. Residential projects should not be far from cities and there should be a public transport system to link the neighborhoods to the city and should cater to other needs, he said. If such factors are not considered, people will not be willing to live in such houses, citing the abandoning of a giant residential project in Mexico because people did not find the facilities they wanted.
New building projects should also be in line with peoples’ aspirations. That is why 40,000 housing units have been built in Brazil strictly adhering to that country’s local architectural style.
David Smith, finance leader for affordable housing in the United States and chairman & founder of the global nonprofit Affordable Housing Institute, said the greatest challenge to affordable housing was financing. It needs successful partnership between public and private sectors with state support and clear laws, Smith said.
KSA needs to build 143,000 units annually
