ISLAMABAD: A discussion of Pakistan’s urbanisation crisis and housing shortage on Thursday brought to light underlying issues that have made housing an unaffordable luxury for the vast majority of Pakistanis, against the backdrop of the PTI government’s Naya Pakistan Housing Programme.

The panel discussion and policy dialogue was organised by the Awami Workers Party and held at Hangout, at the National Institute of Science and Technology Education.

Ammar Rashid, a researcher and organiser in the AWP, kicked off the proceedings with a presentation on the political economy of the housing crisis.

Sharing alarming figures on the critical shortage of 9 to 10 million units of affordable housing, he said: “To understand the nature of the problem we can see the evidence on prices and trends.

“Residential prices rose by 154pc over five years while the GDP growth rate over the same period rose at 20pc. The house price to income ratio in Pakistan is amongst the highest in the world. The total asset value of estimate in real estate is somewhere between $400 and $700 billion while the annual tax revenue is $0.17bn. Real estate in the country is treated like a commodity as opposed to the value of its use.”

The overarching economic reality remains that housing prices have outstripped incomes rapidly in Pakistan at an accelerating rate. Pakistan’s mortgage market is miniscule in part due to the small proportion of financial savings.

Speculation in real estate became a substitute to savings, resulting in a loss of liquidity in the market. Coupled with the lack of transparency in the processes of land transfers and development, this has led to lax urbanisation and sprawl. The wasteful of use of land in the formal market has also resulted in katchi abadis which have high population densities and limited or no provision of basic services.

Jawad Aslam, a member of the Prime Minister’s Housing Taskforce, said every government that has come through has claimed they will build houses.

He said that while this was ninth of tenth on previous governments’ priority lists the PTI government “has promised two things: 10 million jobs and 5m houses and these are the two things they will be held accountable for”.

“The main issue for me is that there should be accessibility; so every person who wants to build a house should be able to do so should be able to do so through some framework. This is currently missing and I believe in the private sector model and the government must create an environment so it is profitable for the private sector to work in low income housing.”

Housing is a problem for 60 to 70pc of our populations, remarked low-income housing expert and Khuda ki Basti founder Tasneem Siddiqui.

“There is an oversupply of houses for the rich and a shortage for the poor, the unemployed and also for those people who have incomes but those incomes are not enough.

“The katchi abadi, the informal segment, is an option for those people who can’t afford to

rent or buy. 30-40pc of the urban population lives in katchi abadis – and that is the national average.

“You can think this a bad option but you can’t eliminate this segment. The people who live in the katchi abadis provide integral services in the cities. Accepting them, regularising them and providing them basic services to these katchi abadis should be the first step for governments,” he said.

Mr Siddiqui said Islamabad denied the existence of katchi abadis until 1997. He suggested that in the long term, laws should ensure that a certain portion of homes in every development are low-income income housing, and the use of plots once purchased must be monitored.

Published in Dawn, November 16th, 2018