The regime’s Majlis (Parliament) Research Center published a report on housing poverty in Iran, which was removed from the center’s website hours after its release. This report revealed that the population living in deteriorated urban areas has increased in recent years.
According to the report, the most significant manifestation of housing poverty in urban areas is the high share of rent in total household expenses. The main reason for this is the high and increasing cost of rent in urban regions.
The report indicated that in provincial divisions, the highest number of families either without housing or struggling with the disparity between income and housing costs are in Tehran and Alborz provinces.
The report also emphasized that nearly 33% of the urban population in the country lives in deteriorated areas, with Tehran province having the highest number of residents in such areas and informal settlements.
Qom province, in relation to its population, has the highest percentage of residents living in deteriorated areas and informal settlements.
In recent years, various reports have been published on the decay of urban areas in different parts of Iran.
In 2020, Mehdi Abouri, then-Deputy Minister of Roads and Urban Development, stated that around one-quarter of the country’s population lives in deteriorated, inefficient areas and informal settlements.
Abouri mentioned that there are over 148,000 hectares of deteriorated, informal, and inefficient areas nationwide, with 20 million people residing in these areas.
The new statistics from the Majlis Research Center show that the number of residents in the country’s deteriorated areas has increased.
According to the report, the share of rent costs in the total expenses of renting households has been increasing during the 2010s, reaching around 36% in 2022.
On an international scale, household housing expenses in Iran in 2022 were about 1.6 times the housing costs in the European Union in the same year.
Given the high share of housing costs, for the bottom three income deciles of urban households in 2022, the average estimated waiting period to become a homeowner was around half a century.
In 2022, female-headed families were approximately 1.2 times more likely to experience inadequate housing, and 1.1 times more likely to lack access to affordable housing, compared to male-headed families. The rate of inadequate housing among the lower classes and the poor is more than twice that of non-poor households.
One of the issues sociologists have repeatedly pointed out in recent years is the impact of inflation on shrinking the middle class and pushing it below the poverty line, a phenomenon that is most evident in the housing market.
