The beauty of being Saudi is our access to new housing through a wide range of programs. And the tragedy of being Saudi is actually living in new housing.
The Ministry of Housing recently ordered the Real Estate Development Fund to allocate SR2.5 billion in loans to build more than 6,000 new housing units. This is part of a larger plan to attempt to fulfill the need to provide as many as 300,000 residential units annually over the next 15 years to keep pace with the growing population. According to the Housing Ministry, Riyadh alone needs to add quarter million new and affordable homes.
All of this looks darn good on paper and kudos to the ministries charged with ensuring that Saudis receive affordable accommodations that they deserve. But woe to the Saudi who moves into a new home and discovers that at the first sign of moisture, their residence feels like living inside a leaky tent. The distance between a developer’s presentation of a new home and the actual condition of that new home is wider than Arizona’s Grand Canyon.
This is not to say that all affordable housing built to accommodate Saudis are slipshod creaky death traps, but the quality of new homes popping up all over the Kingdom deserve some kind of inspection and a guarantee of professional workmanship. A friend of mine recently purchased a roof apartment worth SR900,000 and furnished at an expense of about SR150,000. It was her dream house complete with a rooftop patio and an extraordinary view of Jeddah. Then last week’s rains came and her walls were soaked in water as it pooled on the floor, ruining carpeting and furniture. Let me repeat: A SR900,000 apartment with a leaky roof that caused significant damage to the structure and its contents.
In the interest of full disclosure, one bank that was considering issuing a loan to purchase the apartment rejected my friend’s loan application because the purchase contract misstated the condition of the apartment. So, the buyer, the builder and the bank that ultimately did approve the loan must share responsibility.
But this brings up some interesting issues. Buyers have a tendency to make large purchases, like a home or car, with the heart instead of the head. And when one sees their dream home, the flaws are something they can live with. But the real issue here is the fact that builders construct homes without adequate oversight. Cheap materials, cheap and unskilled labor and the mad rush to meet unrealistic deadlines conspire to produce a substandard building that looks absolutely stunning on a dry, sunny day, but when the wind, sand and rain kick up, well, your dream home is nothing more than a wet cave. The government should step in to protect buyers who may not be as sophisticated as the builder selling a villa that harbors enough flaws that makes it eventually uninhabitable.
Yet we have entered a new phase in Saudi history in which we are building homes at a very rapid rate involving billions of riyals in government funds, not to mention the expenditures of low- and middle-income Saudis to furnish their new affordable homes. And if those affordable homes leak during the first sign of rain, then not only do they risk losing their possessions, but put their lives at stake. We have witnessed dozens of infrastructure projects in Riyadh and Jeddah that give us a sense of security for our future: Flyovers, new curbs and gutters, newly paved thoroughfares and rail lines. But we have also witnessed a serious breakdown in municipal services that has resulted in loss of life, including open sewer lines in which children and adults have fallen to their death.
Clearly, the bidding process for residential construction projects requires tighter controls. Home construction inspection needs to be more thorough and penalties assessed for substandard work. The practice of building fourth and fifth stories on existing three-story structures must be abolished. And construction companies who bid projects, and then take shortcuts by using cheaper materials to increase profit margins after signing a contract must be fined for their transgressions. It’s one thing to have a house with an occasional leak here and there during unexpected rains in a region that has virtually no precipitation, but it’s quite another for a villa with a SR1 million price tag become uninhabitable after the first rain. We must ask ourselves who in the municipality was there to protect the buyer from such a piece of garbage.
—
Email: [email protected]
