Focus on Kabul housing shortage

Roaming damaged western Kabul, Laldana and her children were asking every passer-by if they had seen an unoccupied ruined building so that the homeless widow could live there with her seven-member family. "It is more than misfortune when you cannot find even vacant ruins to live," the mother of seven told IRIN in Kabul, noting she had come from Pakistan seven months ago and lived in a school building. "I am doing laundry for people and cannot save anything after paying for three meals to pay house rent," she noted. As the unpredictable Afghan spring yields to summer, many homeless people like Laldana are trying for refuge in war-damaged buildings and houses in the western part of Kabul. Most have either come from Pakistan and Iran or they are Kabul locals fallen on hard times following huge rent increases last year. "There are totally three families with 25 people living in this half-destroyed building," Ghulam Hassan, a civil servant, told IRIN while squatting beneath the collapsed ceiling of a two-storey former workshop. "Any earthquake or other jolts can destroy the whole building," the forty five-year-old hospital cleaner maintained. Most people in the same predicament live without water or sanitation in these shells, in very unhygienic conditions. Hassan lived in a two-room apartment building in north of Kabul last year. "The landlord increased the rent from US $20 a month to $120 a month which is three times more than my monthly salary," he said, expressing concern that the problem was getting worse. "There are no promising signs when this dilemma will end,” the father of nine underlined. Kabul is currently home to 1,500 families who are living in ruined buildings and schools and over 60,000 families in partially-destroyed houses and apartments, according to UN-HABITAT, the lead UN agency for housing and shelter in the city. For the beleaguered Afghan government, housing has become one of the biggest challenges. "Kabul is in particular need, because of the destruction of 65,000- 70,000 houses and the population of Kabul has now almost doubled since September 2001" Yousuf Pashtum the Afghan Minister of Housing and Urban Development told IRIN noting that according to their surveys 2.8 families or 18-20 persons lived in one house built to accommodate six. "The number of houses urgently needed is 180 percent more than currently existing," Pashtun described. The influx of returnees and the increasing number of foreign organisations’ offices and guest houses have also contributed to the shortage. The former add to the demand and the latter drive rental costs upwards. "US military offices and UN and international aid agencies are the main players in the rental houses markets," Sadiqullah Sadat, an estate agent in Kabul told IRIN. Most of the homeless are not destitute though, many are government civil servants whose salaries are around $50 per month and simply cannot afford a property. Many have to share small apartments with two to three other big families or live in ruins or unoccupied state buildings. The issue is drawing concern in Kabul and local newspapers have published a series of articles on unscrupulous landlords and on calls for government to intervene. Ahmad Bashir a 45-year-old civil servant who currently lives with his brother, had to leave the apartment he was renting for $20 per month, when the landlord took him to the local police station. "The landlord asked me to pay him $80 or leave the building within 45 days," Bashir said explaining he could not find an apartment for $20 - half of his monthly salary. "I was taken to the police station and a one month evacuation dateline was given by the police chief," it was about to become a serious argument then I preferred to live with my brother in one room with my six children than to go to the court," the teacher said. Buying a house or an apartment remains a distant dream for most of Kabul's citizens. According to Sadat a simple three-room apartment now costs around $30,000 while houses start from $50,000 and go up to a staggering three million dollars in different parts of the city. The average annual income of Afghans is $600 to $1000. Minister Pashtun says the government is aware of the problem and taking steps to build more houses. "We are taking the housing problem very seriously and will solve it through the private sectors," Pashtun said, mentioning there were two projects to improve the situation. "One is to develop a small satellite town, called Shar-i-Sabz, with 100,000 units of housing to be completed in the next three to four years. The other is to start rehabilitating western Kabul which suffered the major destruction and which does not have basic utilities such as water and power," he acknowledged. According to Pashtun, the low-cost satellite towns would be constructed by private contractors and the cheapest apartments would cost just $10,000. He said this would help but he also called for more international assistance to alleviate the capital's housing crisis. UN-HABITAT agreed that donors had been slow to put money into housing in the capital. "They don’t want to encourage more people to come to Kabul,” Lalith Lankatilleke, a chief technical adviser, for the UN agency told IRIN. Lankatilleke pointed out though that there had been lots of donor interest in housing in other parts of the country. "We are currently involved in housing programmes in Jalalabad, Kandahar and Marzar provinces," the technical adviser said, adding that UN-HABITAT also had housing programmes in rural areas of Kabul. "Over 3,300 houses have been built by different donors in the Shomali region north of Kabul," he maintained.