Government Approves New Procedures For Waiving Social Housing
The government has taken new measures to simplify transferring public rental housing by proposing a draft to amend and supplement Executive Decree No. 18-153 of June 4, 2018, specifying the methods of transferring these homes.
It was also proposed to transfer the powers to study and decide on requests for the transfer of real estate properties from the joint committee of the Bureau of Promotion and Real Estate Management to the General Manager of the Bureau to reduce the processing time of applications.
The Minister of Housing and Urban Development, Mohamed Tarek Laribi, confirmed in parliamentary correspondence No. 4783, dated April 30, 2024, in response to MP Ahmed Rabhi’s questions, related to the issue of settling the status of requests to waive public rental housing, that his services are in the process of taking a set of measures to simplify the process of waiving these houses.
He explained that his ministerial department has established a specialized committee to study the process of amending and completing Executive Decree No. 18-153 dated June 4, 2018, as the file of the project to amend and supplement the executive decree has been deposited at the level of the General Secretariat of the Government and is reaching the final stages of approval.
In this context – the Minister added – “it was also proposed to transfer the powers to study and decide on requests for the transfer of real estate properties administered by the Promotion and Real Estate Management Bureaus from the Committee of the Promotion and Real Estate Management Bureau, which is formed following Article 19 of the same decree, and from the General Manager of the relevant Promotion and Real Estate Management Bureau, the representative of the state director of state property, the representative of the director in charge of housing, and the representative of the director of the National Housing Fund, to the General Manager of the relevant Real Estate Promotion and Management Office, to reduce the time for processing applications”.
Nevertheless, the first official in charge of the housing sector attributed the reasons for citizens’ reluctance to settle the status of their public rental housing to several factors, including the failure of the beneficiaries of these housing to complete the preparation of their files for deciding the status despite the summonses addressed to them.
A number of these beneficiaries also expressed – the Minister added – their rejection of the sale price, not to mention the continuation of the survey process that is still ongoing for the newly established neighbourhoods to extract real estate books by the State Property Department, whose graphic plans were prepared by the Bureau, and among the factors disrupting the process of waiver is the registration of the real estate base of some neighbourhoods in the survey process in the name of the “municipality or the agency.”
Regarding the wilaya of Djelfa, southern Algiers, as a sample of the cities in which the process of transferring public rental housing was delayed, the Minister confirmed in his response that his departments recorded at the level of this wilaya the filing of more than 3,643 files until May 12, 2024, adding: “In the framework of Executive Decree No. 18-153 Dated June 4, 2018, which specifies the conditions and methods for transferring state real estate properties and properties controlled by real estate promotion and management offices, 1,300 files were studied and settled at the level of this wilaya, i.e. 38% of the total files that citizens filed”.
