BAGHDAD — When Wathiq Htaib talks about the crisis in Iraq, he does not mean politics or sectarian strife. On a recent afternoon, Mr. Htaib, 31, sat on the floor of a small, bare room where six family members sleep each night.
“Every day we have a crisis called the ‘morning bathroom crisis,’ ” Mr. Htaib said, to affirmation and laughter from several of the 13 family members with whom he shares a small house and one very stressed bathroom. “Sometimes we’re late for work because we have to wait an hour for the bathroom.”
Beneath the grand issues hanging over Iraq, like the coming national elections or the continuing violence, the day-to-day lives of most Iraqis turn on more quotidian concerns: the lack of electricity; the pervasive corruption; and a housing shortage that forces two, three, even four families to live under the same roof.
Half of Iraq, it is said, lives with the other half. In some parts of the country, the average home has four people per bedroom, according to the United Nations.
And then there is the bathroom crisis.
“Daily, and severely, we fight over the kitchen and bathroom,” Mr. Htaib said. “It’s seven years now after the collapse, and nothing has changed in our situation. It’s worsening, because the rents are getting higher.”
In Mr. Htaib’s house, a five-room concrete building in Sadr City, four married brothers and their wives take four bedrooms. Their mother, three other brothers, a sister and a young child sleep in the other room, which also doubles as a room to entertain guests — another cause for family disputes.
By United Nations estimates, Iraq has 2.8 million housing units for a population of 30 million, leaving a shortage of about 1.3 million homes. As the population continues to grow, the country needs to build 3.5 million housing units — more than doubling its stock — by 2015, said Istabraq I. al-Shouk, the senior deputy minister of construction and housing.
“This is an old crisis, going back three decades,” Mr. Shouk said. In the late 1980s, at the end of the war with Iran, Saddam Hussein announced a grand government program to build housing, but these plans gave way to the invasion of Kuwait, the Persian Gulf war, international sanctions and the American-led invasion of 2003. In 2003, after Mr. Hussein’s fall, a counselor to the interim housing minister announced a government plan to build a million units by 2010, but only about 7,000 were ever built, Mr. Shouk said.
Now, he said, the government can build only 10 to 15 percent of the needed homes. The rest will have to be built by private investors, foreign and domestic.
So far, foreign investors have been wary of Iraqi real estate because of the violence and the difficulties of dealing with the bureaucracy, which manages most of Iraq’s land.
Though a few construction sites are visible around Baghdad, including in Sadr City, private companies built just “a few thousand” new homes in 2009, and before that almost nothing since 2003, said Sami al-Araji, chairman of the National Investment Commission. The commission now has plans to build 500,000 units in the next two to three years, at a cost of $25 billion, and is seeking investors and developers to start construction. It also has several other multibillion dollar projects in earlier stages of planning, Dr. Araji said.
Building here is not easy. Iraq lacks adequate services for the housing it has now. According to the United Nations, which is working with the Housing Ministry, 89 percent of Iraqi homes lack stable water sources, and 73 percent are not connected to a sewer system. The average house gets eight hours of electricity a day from the grid. Adding houses will only increase the demand for services.
“When we build a project, our mandate is that we receive the land with services in place,” Mr. Shouk said. “The services are mandates for other ministries. If you ask me, ‘Are they satisfying our demands?’ I would say no. We need more infrastructure.” He added: “All the ministries are suffering because there is not enough funding. This cannot be solved now, it needs more time.”
Also, most available lands are classified for agricultural use, and reclassifying them for housing is a slow process, he said.
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