10 things you need to know about the state of social housing

1. The social housing program was launched in 2015 to provide affordable housing for limited-income citizens. The goal was one million units. Since 2015, around 600,000 units have been built. President Sisi issued orders last month for an additional 250,000 units.

2. The Social Housing and Mortgage Finance Fund is responsible for the program. May Abdel-Hamid serves as the CEO of the fund since 2010.

3. The fund stands now at $1.3 billion dollars. It is expecting a $500 million trench from the World Bank that will be dedicated to subsidized housing.

4. The Fund handles up until now 665,000 units, 427,000 are already built and 193,000 are under construction and 35,000 are available to contractors.

5. The lands where the housings are established have to be state-owned with an area not less than 1,000m2 and in an urban area.

6. The governors of different areas share the data about available lands with these criteria and the condition of infrastructure in these areas to the fund.

7. The units are then advertised and the fund received applicants for the units. Every advertisement receives about 250,000 applications.

8. The qualified candidates are determined by cabinet decisions. Al-Ahram reported that the latest decision was to allocate units to married couples with total monthly income around LE5,700, single people whose income is a bit over LE 4,000 and people who are living on minimum wage of LE 1,300 per month. Applicants with special needs, divorced woman and widows have priority to 5% of the units.

9. The units are usually about 90 square meters and range in price between LE250,000 to LE350,000. Prices are expected to hike 10% up if construction material prices increase.

10. More than 300,000 families have been housed so far in the subsidized units, where the overall value of subsidies is estimated at close to LE 5billion.