Rent is modern age slavery
If we observe main stream media (MSM), everyone is yelling about freedom in 21st century, but it’s just to fool people so they never know their real problems. The reality is that biggest slavery in human history can be seen in 21st century in form of debt & rent slavery. Major reason of rent slavery is that property mafia is very strong in every country. In the absence of property ownership laws to restrict more than one or two properties, few people buy lot of properties and other people just pay the rents, this is why rent is modern age slavery.
Situation in Pakistan
Renter are also increasing in Pakistan as land and properties are secured by few people with black money. When black money is widespread, property prices are always abnormally high. High property prices reduce the ownership and when people cannot buy property they have to just rent it. In just last 10 years, property prices have skyrocketed in Pakistan. This is the gift of unchecked black money in Pakistan.
Many families even cannot afford to rent a decent home
Ideally people should spend just 30% of their incomes on renting a home. But in Pakistan many people are paying 50% or more of their incomes on rents. After paying rents, many people have very less money to spend on food, education, medicine or other needs. Everyone is not blessed with parents who own homes and even most private companies don’t pay rents. People with 1 Lac monthly salaries are complaining about high rents, so we can easily imagine the miseries of people on minimum wage.
Some efforts to provide affordable housing in Pakistan
The Punjab government started the Ashiana Housing Project to provide affordable housing to general public. The aim is to provide the affordable houses as compared to open market. The effort is stunning but due to limited scale masses couldn’t benefit it. The government of KPK also started the affordable housing developments but once again scale was very limited.
What are the remedies?
- Affordable housing should be developed in every part of Pakistan for the people on minimum wage.
- If government cannot provide housing, people on minimum wage should be given rent benefits.
- There should be restriction to buy more than 1 or 2 homes.
- Influx of black money in real estate sector should be controlled.
- Every new residential development should provide 20% affordable houses, as it happens in Western countries.
- Affordable housing should be included in the infrastructure developments. If we can spend billions on roads, hospitals, schools and colleges, then why not for housing?