The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) faces a shortfall of some 3.6 million units of affordable housing over the next five years unless the region’s governments and property developers make a combined effort to solve the problem, warns a report by the global real estate investment and advisory firm Jones Lang LaSalle.
Egypt, the region’s most populous country, faces the biggest shortfall of affordable housing, with Jones Lang LaSalle estimating the shortfall between supply and demand would reach 1.5 million units. War-ravaged Iraq is one million units short and Morocco needs 600,000. Even wealthy countries face a shortage, although on a smaller scale: Saudi Arabia needs 400,000 the report forecast.
The shortage is serious enough that Craig Plumb, director of MENA research at Jones Lang LaSalle, cited it as a factor in the turmoil that has swept the region this year.
“The lack of access to affordable housing has been identified as one of the problems behind the Arab Spring. Social unrest has been linked to lack of jobs and lack of housing,” Plumb told The Media Line. “As a result, there have been fairly bold initiatives by governments [to address it] in Egypt and Saudi Arabia.”
The affordable housing shortage is an example of the problematic economic growth the MENA region has experienced. While many countries saw their gross domestic product expand at relatively high rates, most of the extra wealth accrued to the richest while incomes stagnated and insufficient numbers of new jobs were generated. In the housing market, a parallel trend occurred, with developers focused on building for the top income earners.
But with the region’s population growth outpacing much of the world and a very young population that will be forming families and demanding homes, MENA economies have little time to waste, the report warned.
http://www.themedialine.org/news/news_detail.asp?NewsID=33278 [3]