A Tumultuous Housing Program in Algeria

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/10/world/africa/a-tumultuous-housing-program-in-algeria.html

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ALGIERS — The air was festive on a recent morning as families moved into their new apartments, courtesy of the Algerian government. Women’s shrieks of joy sounded from the balconies as children tried out the swings beneath a large banner that declared, “Our aim, Algiers, a capital without slums.”

But the celebrations were quickly followed by disappointment, even anger. The construction was shoddy. Water coursed down the walls of the main hallway. And the apartments, at Cité Kourifa, were too small for families that had grown in the many years since they had applied for government housing.

“Last night, I had to spend the night in the car,” said Ali Mehdad, 60, a retired taxi driver who had moved in the previous day with his family of eight, including a grandson. “One son is 35 and cannot get married, because how can you add more people here?”

The government program, one of the most ambitious in the region, is Algeria’s answer to galloping population growth, rapid urbanization and a housing crisis that, many argue, lies at the base of much of the country’s despair.

Critics, however, say the housing handouts are creating as many problems as they solve, fueling corruption, violence and a culture of dependency while opportunities to spur growth outside Algeria’s vast oil sector are ignored.

Even much of the construction, intended to generate employment and to diversify Algeria’s economy from its dependence on the oil sector, has been outsourced to Chinese companies. Recently, Turkish and Egyptian companies have also joined the building boom.

The housing program is nonetheless popular, and vastly oversubscribed. Nearly 70 percent of Algeria’s 39 million people now live in cities along the northern coast, often in slums or in densely packed 1950s tenements rife with drugs and crime.

The program amounts to a big government transfer of oil revenue to head off the kind of strains that could lead to unrest.

Apartment blocks in pastel shades have sprung up in four new towns and scores of suburbs across the north of the country.

The government has built two million homes since 2008, and aims to build as many by 2019, according to a government report on housing presented last year. “Access to decent housing has always been one of the government priorities,” the report states.

The cost of the program is not public, but has run into billions of dollars after more than a decade, analysts say.

“It is the only good thing that happened to Algeria,” said Hakim Ghazi, 25, sitting with a friend outside a 10-year-old social housing project in Bab Ezzouar, on the southeast of Algiers.

The World Bank and the United Nations say, however, that Algeria’s problem is not so much a lack of housing as its exorbitant cost — caused by rigid government policies.

Despite substantial oil and gas revenue, Algerians’ salaries have declined in real terms since the 1980s, and a home can cost up to 12 times an annual salary, far above world standards, according to a U.N.-Habitat report.

The lack of housing weighs heavily on society and delays marriage for many young people, the International Federation for Human Rights wrote in a report in 2011. “Overcrowding, lack of public services in new settlements, the persistence of slums, all create a climate of insecurity, numerous Algerians confirm,” the report said.

Algeria is indeed a particularly volatile society, uprooted by two brutal wars in 60 years and chafing under authoritarian rule. Even the way the houses are distributed would hardly pass for a social program in most other countries.

Riot police officers armed with Taser guns turn out in force each time housing lists are announced and relocations are carried out.

The families who moved in December to the apartments at Cité Kourifa, in a suburb 20 miles east of the city center, said they had been told to prepare their belongings the day before and then ordered at 4 a.m. to vacate their homes in a slum across town.

Only then were they shown the list of families allocated apartments and handed keys. By 10 a.m., bulldozers moved in to destroy the slum, to prevent others from occupying the homes. Five people whose names were not on the list were left homeless, former residents said.

Nabila Ounas was one of those celebrating the move to Cité Kourifa last month. “I’m so happy,” she said, showing off the apartment.

“We were living in such conditions, surrounded by snakes and scorpions,” she said. “I lost my first child because of the conditions.” Born prematurely in the slum, the baby survived only an hour, she said.

But her joy was fragile. She began to weep as she recounted the turmoil of the move, how bulldozers destroyed the slum as they watched, and how a teenage neighbor slit his throat when he learned he had not been assigned an apartment.

“His name was not on the list, and he committed suicide,” she said, wiping her cheeks. “He was 16 or 17 years old. He was completely lost.” The youth, named Abdennour, came from a broken family and fell through the net, she said.

The government has created a time bomb by handing out apartments, said Rachid Tlemçani, a professor of political science at the University of Algiers.

“Why did the government not liberalize housing?” he asked. “In Tunisia, you do not have this problem, because they had a strategy. Here, you rely on the state, which is very authoritarian and at the same time corrupt.”

“After each decision, we have riots,” he said.

Elected mayors and heads of communes have been replaced over the years by government functionaries, who have been accused of selling apartments or taking bribes, Professor Tlemçani said.

In 2009, the General Inspectorate of Finance found that nearly 500 names on a housing list for 3,200 homes were children of high-level government officials and even of presidential staff members, El Watan newspaper reported.

Housing has become such a source of anger and discontent that the mayor of one province stopped posting lists of people to be assigned apartments because each time, it set off violence.

“We can manage the other problems, except the housing,” said Amar Kamiche, a retiree who lives in a 1950s tenement in west Algiers. He never received government housing, despite applying in 1970, and he and his wife raised seven children in a tiny apartment where the toilet is in the kitchen.

He recalled the optimism of the 1960s, when he traveled to France to train as a patisserie chef. “We never thought Algeria would be what it is today,” he said in sadness. “I left a great country, and I expected it to be greater when I came back.”