Shafaq News- Baghdad

Iraq needs around five million additional homes, yet two decades of housing strategies have failed to narrow the shortage. The latest government initiative, a plan to distribute one million residential plots, promises a new start. Still, experts interviewed by Shafaq News say previous failures point to a deeper problem: institutions capable of enforcing land laws, financing affordable housing, and protecting projects from political interference never kept pace with the plans themselves.

The scale of the shortfall is not disputed. By the estimate of the Ministry of Construction, Housing and Municipalities, some four million people live in informal settlements mainly in Baghdad, neighborhoods built outside city planning and property law, cut off from the schooling, sewage, and electricity that legal residency confers. A population that has passed 46 million adds hundreds of thousands of new households a year. What has consistently failed to keep pace is the state's capacity to deliver.

Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi's "one-million residential land plot" initiative —a scheme to distribute plots nationwide and let citizens build on them— is the most ambitious housing answer Baghdad has offered in years. In July, as the plan moved toward rollout, the National Investment Commission, the federal body that licenses private capital projects, suspended approvals for new residential-investment projects pending a review, with acting commission head Haidar Mohammed ordering a full inventory of active and planned projects and warning of legal consequences for noncompliance. A government halting its own construction market mid-stride, because its signature plan is not yet load-bearing, is the pattern in miniature: the announcement precedes the machinery.

The roots of that pattern predate the current cabinet. Economist Karim al-Hilu locates the failure below the level of construction budgets. "The core problem is not simply housing; it is the state's ability to enforce the law," he told Shafaq News. Land encroachment is older than the modern Iraqi state, he said, but it widened sharply after the 2003 US-led invasion, when hollowed-out institutions let illegal occupation of public land take hold, first on state property, later spreading to farmland and waterways. It endured because political protection and local influence kept regulators from acting evenly, applying the rules to some and sparing others.

The same weakness has bent the supply side toward the wrong beneficiaries. Housing complexes meant for low-income families were instead monopolized by money launderers and corrupt investors, al-Hilu told Shafaq News; that helps explain how twenty years of building left the deficit intact. The shortage was not simply the result of market forces. The intended buyers were not merely priced out; they were pushed out by actors the state failed to keep from the door.

From inside the planning apparatus, the diagnosis is much the same. Former Ministry of Planning spokesman Abdul Zahra al-Hindawi has described housing as a central pillar of Iraq's 2024–2028 development plan, with the ministry mapping urban expansion through statistical databases and geographic systems to track density and the spread of informal settlements. The instruments are real, and what they measure has not shrunk. Urban growth, al-Hindawi acknowledged, has repeatedly outrun the state's capacity to regulate it, a rare instance of the planner conceding that the plan describes the problem more reliably than it solves it.

Read more: How can Iraq help 3.5 million citizens living in urban slums?

Construction Ministry spokesman Istabraq Sabah has cast encroachment on residential land as among the government's highest priorities, citing cabinet decisions to regularize informal housing and committees formed to survey properties and verify eligibility. The stated aim reaches past legalizing what already exists toward heading off new settlements through updated city master plans and earlier detection of violations.

According to a source within the Housing Ministry, more than 1,600 development projects sit stalled across Iraq, abandoned housing complexes among them.

Economic researcher Ahmed Eid traced the stagnation to poor planning and politically driven contracting, which he said had left Iraq with hundreds of stalled and unfinished projects, housing complexes among them, eroding the investor confidence any new scheme must rebuild. That erosion is the headwind the land-plot initiative now faces: a program leaning on private capital, launched into a market taught by two decades of abandoned sites to expect little.

Dhiaa al-Hindi, a member of parliament's Investment and Development Committee, points to fiscal shocks and specific measures, among them Order 347 of 2015, a financial-crisis directive that halted dozens of initiatives and was never fully unwound. "The delays have undermined public trust," al-Hindi told Shafaq News, adding that bureaucratic procedures continue to slow residential projects in the most densely populated provinces. Combined with weak oversight, he argued, these delays compounded into a crisis of execution rather than of design.

All those interviewed by Shafaq News describe the same missing element from different chairs: enforcement that does not wait on political will, contracting insulated from political selection, and financing calibrated to the incomes most exposed. Nearly every national plan since 2003 has listed housing beside anti-corruption and governance reform, and each has resembled its predecessor on paper. None has produced the condition under which a plan becomes policy rather than a document.

The al-Zaidi initiative now enters that same space, and its fate rests on the one variable two decades of plans never resolved: whether the state can enforce, allocate, and finance with enough consistency to seat ordinary Iraqis in the homes it builds. Nothing in the plan's design yet answers that, which is why, for now, housing policy remains defined by how faithfully each plan repeats the last.

Read more: What does Iraq's new government promise? A guide to Ali Al-Zaidi's ministerial program

Written and edited by Shafaq News staff.