Baku, Azerbaijan, Oct.22
By Fatih Karimov - Trend:
Some 22 million Iranians are living in old houses and informal settlements, Iranian MP Mansour Arami recently said.
He said 12 million new houses should be built by 2025, Iran's IRNA news agency reported on October 22.
Around 77,000 hectares of residential area across the country is old and historic, which should be renovated, he added.
Informal settlement is a place where people decide to live and build temporary shelters, often followed by more permanent houses.
Deputy intelligence minister for municipal and city issues, Hamid Reza Saromi, said in February that 59 percent of Iran's population lives as tenants.
This is while, according to Saromi, in developed countries, tenants amount to 30 percent of a country's total population.
"Back in 1996 Iran had the house-owners at slightly under 70 percent of the overall population," Saromi said. "In the last 15 years this percentage has reduced."
He went on to add that every year about 1 million of marriages are arranged in Iran, which results in more people searching for permanent place of living.