Governments’ Losing Battle With Housing Ghoul

The flood of liquidity has inundated the housing market, drowning the citizens. Yet, policymakers failed to heed warnings on the growth, at breakneck speed, of money supply over years. This was stated by Naser Zakeri, economist, in an article for Persian daily Shargh. Below is a translation of the text.
Paucity of housing, as a national problem, came to the fore in the mid-1960s, when the 4th Development Plan was in force. At first, the problem sprang into existence in Tehran and some large cities as a result of the inflow of emigrants from villages but in the following decades a large part of the country was struggling with the shortage of housing. According to a report published in fiscal 1967-68 by the Plan and Budget Organization, 40% of urban households had one room to live in and 30% had two rooms. In the 1980s, the government managed to solve this problem to a great extent through housing cooperatives. In the following decades, each government tried to resolve this worsening problem in its own approach, but the current state of the country shows those efforts were futile.