The outcome of Raisi’s promise to build 1 million homes per year

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Iranian regime supreme leader Ali Khamenei handpicked Ebrahim Raisi, known for his pivotal role in the 1988 massacre of political prisoners, with the promise of building one million housing units per year.

But the situation has reached to a point that on July 29, the state-run Faraz website wrote, “Thousands of families have stored away their household furniture and have become homeless. The population living in outskirts of cities has reached 20 million people. Two years ago, the average price per square meter of housing was 330 million rials, and now it has reached 780 million rials. This means a 250 percent increase in just two years.”

Referring to a series of social and family crises, Faraz added, “The situation has now reached a point where many families can no longer afford to rent a unit with the minimum size, and they have no choice but to return to their parents’ house or migrate to a smaller city”.

Some families have fallen apart, some moved their furniture and belongings to worn-out iron containers on the outskirts of Tehran, and many cannot even afford to pay for the rent of warehouses and containers.

On July 30, the state-run Tejarat News website published a report titled “Tenants looking for containers.” In this report, it wrote, “One of the storekeepers around Tehran said that many families used to store their furniture in containers with one-year or two-year contracts, but after paying the first month of the rent, they were not able to pay any more. The situation makes them to move to city’s suburbs or migrate to somewhere else. Subsequently, in this unbearable condition they have no choice but let go of the entire household items and furniture they owned.”

The same time as catastrophic spread of homelessness and marginalization takes place, Raisi prevents media from publishing the news and the statistics regarding these problems.

On July 6, Faraz reported about the “eight-month concealment of housing statistics.” And on July 31, the Hamamihan website wrote, “The Central Bank and Statistics Center of Iran have stopped publishing statistics related to the housing sector since December of last year.”

After the scandal of the housing crisis, Raisi tried deceitfully to downplay the crisis by announcing the plan for building “25-meter houses.” Of course, this attempt did not work for him, and officials loyal to the regime, fearing that end result of this project would anger of homeless people wrote, “Nobody has forgotten the promises of Ebrahim Raisi to house the people by building one million houses per year.

An official’s comment that a 25-meter space can provide the well-being of a family, has become controversial that how these matchbox houses can be effective in upgrading the living condition of people?” (Source: Eghtesad News—July 31)

On August 1, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of the Majlis (parliament) described the solution to the housing problem as a “permanent solution to the problem of people’s livelihood” and said, “Now both man and woman of a household work two shifts together but are not able to pay the rent.”

By looting public resources and wealth and colluding with the housing mafia, which consists of banks and institutions affiliated with IRGC, this government turned housing into a life-threatening tragedy for workers, laborers, and youth in Iran.

According to the regime’s own websites, for those who were born in the 1990s, it will take 166 years to accumulate enough wealth to buy a house.

As foreseen by the Iranian Resistance, such programs, which are based on the exploitation of workers, only intensify the conflict between the people and the regime and will be a source of crisis within the regime itself. The complete failure of the current government in all the fraudulent populist promises it has made, such as stabilizing the exchange rate or building millions of houses, has reached such a scandalous dimension that the majority of the members of the Majlis, who previously supported Raisi’s presidency, are asking him to resign for the sake of saving regime from looming crises.

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