Dhuwaihi, Minister of Housing, was the guest at the first joint responsibility dialogue meeting held at Okaz Organization for Press and Publication in what was planned to be a series of meetings between officials, on one hand, and specialist and interested citizens. The minister asserted that the ministry has completed a housing strategy but, due to its many complex details, he opted not to elaborate on it because there was not enough time to do it. The minister did not provide the participants much information about the strategy even in a summary form but he welcomed the participants to visit the ministry's headquarters in Riyadh. Regarding the land for the housing project, Dr. Al-Dhuwaihi said the Ministry has a property in central Jeddah and north of King Abdul Aziz International Airport. But again details like the total area, how much of it can be used for the current need and how much would remain for future use were not provided. The minister made references on incentives to be offered to owners of vacant lots which can be potentially developed, but again no information about this was provided. He also mentioned some mechanism to be used for distributing residential units —mechanism similar to the Ministry of Labor's Hafiz mechanism to monitor domestic unemployment, for which the minister expressed his admiration. He neither gave a timeline to start the construction in the Kingdom's major cities nor specified what measures will be used to determine construction allocation for each region. Furthermore, he made no reference on housing projects in small towns or on the outskirts of major cities as an option to deal with the current housing problem. The minister gave a picture of the current housing shortage which the country bears for years in a simplified formula wherein the total number of Saudis is divided by an average number of five persons in a family to get the number of housing units to be given to each family. The formula arrived at the answer of 800,000 housing units. The simplified assessment of the current housing situation did not consider the number of newly-started families and was not linked to the local real-estate market cycle and did not provide estimate of the housing demand in the coming years as well as the type of housing units needed. He talked about the achievements of the Real Estate Development Fund (RDF) and its housing loans it provided to the citizens in a period during which the RDF was not managed by the Ministry of Housing or the Housing Commission. The minister declined to answer a question about the mechanism which the government will use to provide lots for both men and women who gave up their land to get a housing loan from the Fund because they could not afford to buy land suitable for family home. The minister bets on correction-laden real-estate market data which he believed will help reduce land prices. Now, is it logical for a ministry authorized to provide house-and-lot packages to citizens by counting on a collapsed market to fulfill its objectives? Where is the “strategy” and its associated plans, policies and procedures to solve the current crisis? And, here we have to examine the minister's response to a question to give run-down districts in big cities a makeover by tearing down old dwellings and providing residents with alternative housing. His response was that it is a matter for the Ministry of Municipalities and Rural Affairs to address. Again, he declined to offer more details and did not commit either himself or the ministry on how to provide housing to an ill-fated sector of the population which is increasing in number as time goes by, especially in the Makkah region which has the most pressing need for alternative housing. *Professor Al-Tawati teaches at the College of Business Administration in Jeddah. He can be contacted at [email protected] __
