Addressing affordable housing in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq

Abstract

This dissertation examines the distribution of affordable housing in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI) from 2006 to 2022, with a primary analytical focus on 2008 to 2014, a period marked by conflict, displacement, and oil-linked revenue volatility. It asks how market conditions, government programmes, and political dynamics shape access to housing and with what distributional consequences. Affordable housing is defined, following Hilber et al. (2022), as dwellings whose monthly housing costs are below 30% of household income. Affordable supply in the KRI is channelled through two legal tracks: a public low-income programme delivered by the Ministry of Construction and Housing (MoCH) under Law No. 7 of 2008 and its First Amendment (Law No. 16 of 2011), and a Housing Fund that co-finances private developer projects licensed under Investment Law No. 4 of 2006. In broad terms, the MoCH track offers core units and concessional mortgages, while the Investment-Law track supports purchases through partial loans to eligible buyers and requires developers to provide on-site infrastructure. A convergent mixed-methods design combines two main data sources: (1) secondary data on construction, prices, and budgets obtained from the Kurdistan Regional Statistical Office (KRSO), United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat), and the World Bank; (2) surveys of 87 real-estate brokers, and 386 Duhok residents (63 programme beneficiaries and 323 non-beneficiaries), alongside 30 stakeholder interviews. These dynamics included a documented programme-launch deficit of approximately 71,000 dwellings and steep cost escalation, with average unit costs rising from USD 31,154 in 2011 to USD 56,078 in 2013; Erbil remained among the highest-price markets. As oil rents supplied 90–95% of the Kurdistan Regional Government’s (KRG) revenue, housing budgets were exposed to price shocks. Distributionally, inter-governorate allocations depart from population and indicator-based benchmarks in ways consistent with territorial coalition dominance and network-mediated access; legal instruments do not establish governorate quotas. Interview evidence indicates that departures from benchmark allocations are often driven by liaison routines, political endorsements, and the frequent presence of applicants or intermediaries in the capital. Similarly, Housing Fund loans skewed toward moderate-income buyers who could meet collateral and guarantor conditions, limiting reach to the poorest. The dissertation concludes that improving affordability and distributional fairness requires both programme and governance measures: transparent, published need-scoring for MoCH allocations; retargeting Housing Fund support toward instruments that reach very-low-income households; stronger rules for land release, developer selection, and regulatory oversight; public geocoded reporting on projects and beneficiaries; and counter-cyclical funding arrangements to reduce shock-induced delivery collapses.