Attempts to Solve Housing Crisis Cause Problems

It sounded like a great system. However currently many of the locals building houses are worried: something seems to have gone wrong.

For many of those who applied for home loans, a year has gone by and they have yet to receive any of the money from the loan. After a series of protests, the government started to receive loan applications in October 2013. Some of them were processed. But nobody seems to have received a cent yet.

Ahlan Karim is one of these people: he wanted to submit his application in February of 2013 but he had to wait until October to be able to do so. In the meantime the house he is building still lacks doors and windows and he’s still living in expensive rental accommodation.

“I couldn’t go on building the house,” explains the 30-year-old from Sulaymaniyah. “In the past people would always say building a house makes you age. But I think I might die before this house is finished,” he jokes before adding more seriously: “I wouldn’t have bought this land and started this building if I had not been able to loan money from the government.”

Those building homes in the region’s cities can get a loan of up to IQD20 million (around uS$16,800) and those building in the region’s villages may apply for IQD25 million (around US$21,000). The loans are given out in two instalments with the first paid after the basic structure of the house is completed and the second paid after construction is completed. And those instalments are paid in monthly lots. No payments are made at all until local authorities have checked the house.

“The pay outs of the loans stops at the end of each fiscal year in order to finalize accounts,” said Dalir Tariq, a spokesperson for Iraqi Kurdistan’s Ministry of Finance. “No new pay outs can be made until the region’s budget for 2014 is finalized and approved by the Iraqi Kurdish Parliament.”

However the financial committee of the Change movement, or Gorran – an oppositional movement in Iraqi Kurdistan even though they currently have the second highest number of seats in the local Parliament – says suspending the loan pay outs is illegal. Local law says that even if the budget approval is delayed, loans for homes, marriages and small businesses should still be paid because if they are not, ordinary citizens may suffer.