President Hassan Rouhani launched a series of government-backed housing projects via videoconferencing on Oct. 22.
“A total of 11,600 residential units out of 400,000 homes for middle-income households built under the National Housing Initiative were inaugurated across eight provinces,” Deputy Minister of Roads and Urban Development Mahmoud Mahmoudzadeh was quoted as saying by Mehr News Agency.
“The government provided 14,000 billion rials [$48.78 million] of the total investment of 55,000 billion rials [$191.63 million] needed to complete these residential units in the form of granting land as per 99-year lease agreements to housing cooperatives. The construction of these residential units, which started in early 2019, created 33,000 jobs.”
In the second part of the ceremony, 135,000 building plots were handed over to real-estate developers (one plot of land for a group of three or more developers) as government partners in the National Housing Initiative.
According to the housing official, 14,500 residential units are under construction in underdeveloped areas, of which 6,700 were inaugurated in the ceremony.
The construction operation of 69,000 residential units based on several memorandums of understanding signed with state bodies was also flagged off on Thursday. A total of 30,000 units will be built for employees of the Education Ministry, 37,000 homes for those with the Armed Forces of the Islamic Republic of Iran and 2,000 will be built for workers as per an agreement with the Ministry of Cooperatives, Labor and Social Welfare. Mahmoudzadeh noted that the construction of 14,500 residential units for the employees of Education Ministry has already started.
The total value of the National Housing Initiative is estimated at 2,400 trillion rials ($8.36 billion), of which 600 trillion rials ($2.09 billion) are attributed to the value of land and 1,800 trillion rials ($6.27 billion) to the costs of construction services and materials.
President Rouhani also marked the completion of 40,108 homes constructed under Mehr Housing Project.
The protracted Mehr Housing project was concluded in a number of provinces and only 53,000 such units remain incomplete, News.mrud.ir quoted Mahmoudzadeh as saying.
The Mehr project is a large-scale construction program initiated in 2007 by the previous administration to provide 2.2 million low-income people with housing units through free land and cheap credits.
“Only 690,000 of 2.2 million Mehr Housing units were completed under the previous administration,” President Rouhani said.
“In actuality, it was the Government of Prudence and Hope [his own administration] that carried the burden of the project. As such, 1.35 million residential units of Mehr project were constructed and delivered to people. The remaining 50,000 units need to be finished by the end of this administration [August 2021]. There are about 100,000 units that either don’t have any applicant or have legal problems.”
