Minister promises 70,000 new housing units by 2014

Housing Minister Abdulwahed Al-Awadhi said yesterday that the ministry plans to construct about 70,000 new housing units for citizens by 2014 in a bid to reduce the waiting period for Kuwaitis to get a government house.
The plan involves the construction of at least three major cities and several other residential areas in a bid to meet increasing demand for houses as the Kuwaiti population rises, Awadhi told the National Assembly during a special debate on housing. The minister said that the number of housing applications had risen to 69,500 by the end of last year and that every year the ministry receives more than 8,000 new applications. The new cities envisaged in the plan include Kheiran, Mutla and Sabah Al-Ahmad which together will provide more than 50,000 housing units, the minister said.
As accelerating the rate of construction would require huge funding, Awadhi said the ministry plans to invite the private sector to contribute and also plans to sell government land in Kuwait City to raise sufficient funds.
MPs agreed during the debate to amend the housing law to raise the capital of the Housing Authority to KD 1.6 billion and the increase will be paid by the finance ministry. The amendment also allows the government to sell state land in an auction to use the returns for building new housing units. Awadhi said that if the plan goes on schedule, the number of waiting applicants will be considerably reduced and that the waiting period will be greatly less than at present which sometimes reaches 15 years.
Under Kuwaiti law, every citizen with a family has the right to a government house against a nominal monthly installment or for a piece of land at a KD 70,000 soft loan to build his own house. During the debate, MPs cast doubt over the government ability to be able to implement the plan, saying that they had in the past heard many such plans which were never implemented. MPs insisted that the main problem for government housing in Kuwait is the fact that the state holds 93 percent of land in the country and refuses to release enough land for housing purposes under different excuses.
Most of the remaining seven percent is held by a group of influential people who do not want the government to provide more lands so the price of land remains very high, MPs said. ?Kuwait is the only state in the world where the government holds 93 percent of the land. It is also the only country where the price of land is as high as New York. You need to be a millionaire to be able to build your own house,? MP Marzouk Al-Ghanim said. ?We must break the government monopoly over land and also the monopoly of a handful of people who want to keep prices high,? he said.
At the end of the debate MPs passed recommendations calling on the Kuwait Oil Company to release within two weeks two huge plots of land in the south of the country for housing purposes. They also passed another recommendation calling on the government to speed up the construction of houses. Published Date: June 13,Kuwait times