Afghanistan Peace Campaign
A view of Kabul city centre, with unplanned houses perched on the mountain slope of Koh-e Asmai/Asamai (aka TV Hill), comprising the western side of the Deh Afghanan neighbourhood, and upscale projects in the background. Photo: Fabrizio Foschini, 2012
I have to leave this house because I can’t afford it. It’s been a month since I started looking for another house, but I still can’t find one. I went to many property dealers. There are houses with very high rents. Wherever you go, you can’t find four-room houses with rents lower than 16,000 [USD 235]. During the Republic, I also lived in a rental house. I used to pay 7,000 afghanis [USD 100], but it’s now 12,000 afghanis [USD 176].
Rahmatullah even tried to fund a home with a gerawi mortgage,[1] but found they were too high as well. His experience is typical, according to other tenants and estate agents we interviewed. Aminullah, an estate agent in Qala-ye Fathullah in PD10, said that under the previous government, “the price of buying, selling, rent and mortgage in this area was high,” but prices “dropped to unprecedentedly [low] levels,” with the change in government. The fall of the Republic was accompanied by the mass emigration of Afghans with links to other countries: according to The New Humanitarian, around 124,000 Afghans were evacuated from Afghanistan on or just after 15 August 2021 when the Taleban re-took power. More left later or considered trying to leave (see also BBC report here). Those leaving “sold their houses for half the price,” said Aminullah, “and that reduced rents and mortgages.” Another estate agent, Sayed Hamidullah, in the Kart-e Naw area in PD8 also said that, in the central areas of Kabul, such as Shahr-e Naw, Qala-ye Fathullah and Taimani, many NGOs run by foreigners who had paid high rents, closed, again dampening the market.
In the first year after the takeover, Hamidullah also remembered that some people with two or three houses feared the new government would take or destroy their properties, so they sold them at low prices. At the same time, people in Kabul who had money were reluctant to buy property because the future was uncertain. People worried that the economic situation would worsen, he said, or there would be war. House prices fell, as did rents.
Tenants were delighted. Kabul resident Harun told Tolonews on 15 September 2021 that he was glad the exorbitant rents of the Islamic Republic were over: “I have lived in a rented house for 20 years and was paying 10,000 afghanis [USD 145] for a three-room house. I am very happy that the rent of the house has now been reduced to 5,000 afghanis [USD 72].”
Estate agents were less happy. Immediately after the takeover, reported Pajhwok, their business came to a standstill. Rents for an average three-room house, one broker told the news agency, were down by a third, from 300 USD to 200 USD: “Overall,” he said, “there is no business, no one rents a house, no one buys it.” In early 2022, estate agents reported that rents, prices and mortgages had fallen by more than 50 per cent in the previous six months (see Pajhwokreporting).
The new rents
The tide has now turned well and truly. Estate agents supplied us with rental price increases that they have witnessed:central districts, such as Shahr-e Naw, Qala-ye Fathullah, Kart-e Char and Kart-e Naw, they say, have witnessed a 40 per cent increase in rents this year, they said, while in the suburbs of Kabul, rents have increased by 20 to 30 per cent. Demand also varies within neighbourhoods. Estate agent Aminullah said demand was still low for renting or buying big houses in his neighbourhood of Qala-ye Fathullah, but the market was hot for small houses, leading to a hike in prices for these dwellings (see also this online property dealer website). Another estate agent, Sayed Hamidullah, in the Kart-e Naw area in PD8, described the increase in the price of land and housing in Kabul as unprecedented. “In some areas,” he said, “prices are increasing to such an extent that ordinary people and even the middle class are unable to buy. Selling and buying lands in these areas is only for the rich and high-ranking government officials” (see also RFL reporting).
One broker gave some average rents to illustrate the general fall and rise – see the figure below.
The shooting up of rents and prices has made life difficult for many. Mursal, who lives with her husband and only child in a rented house in Kart-e Naw in the 8th district of Kabul, said that at the beginning of Islamic Emirate rule, she was paying 6,000 afghanis (USD 85) in rent, but now the house owner has increased the rent to 9,000 afghanis (USD 135). Looking to see if she could get a cheaper rent if she moved, she said: “Wherever you go, you can’t find a two-room house to rent for less than 12,000 afghanis [USD 171] and apartments aren’t so cheap either.”
Another resident, Ahmad Shah, who rents an apartment in Stanakzai Mina in PD8, said the rent rises “have made life difficult for those who don’t own a home,” but “whatever rent the owner asks for, you need to pay it.” Recent rises have been crippling, he said, a three-room apartment renting for less than 200 USD three years ago is now going for 300 USD. “There is no authority to control apartment rents in Kabul,” he complained and stressed that the hikes have added to the struggles many people have to afford basic necessities. He also said that for those with roots in the countryside, going home is also not the safety net it used to be:
We don’t know where to go. … It used to be good that when there was no work in the city, you’d go to your village and work on the farms, but now there’s no [work] in the villages either – there isn’t enough water to irrigate the lands. The economic situation of the rural people is very bad. Here, if there’s nothing, a dry piece of bread can be found. At least, if there’s no work, we can sell plastic bags to get a piece of bread, but in the countryside, there’s nothing.
Rahmatullah, who lives in the Yekeh Tut area, is a hawker supporting a family of seven and is no longer allowed to sell goods inside the city. He said he is squeezed from both sides by high rents and little earning potential:
We are confused and don’t know what to do. Food prices are very high, but rents have also got so high … [how] should we pay the rent and have something to eat? I earn 100 to 200 Afghanis [USD 3] a day and use it all for daily expenses. At the end of the month, I’m in debt for the rent. Right now, I’m in debt to the landlord for three months. I don’t know where I’ll find the money. The landlord has told me to leave the house because the rent’s increased to 12,000 afghanis [USD 171]. The government neither controls house rents nor does it allow hawkers to work in the city, but beats them [if they do]. What can we do? Where can we go?
Tenants under particular pressure – those whose homes have been demolished
In October 2022, the IEA established the Land-Grabbing Prevention and Restitution Commission within the Ministry of Justice. Its purpose is to investigate past grabbing of state land and reclaim it. (For a December 2023 overview of how the commission works in different cities, including Kabul, see AAN’s ‘Land in Afghanistan: This time, retaking instead of grabbing land?’). The decree that established the commission demanded that homeowners living on usurped land now rent what had been their property from the government; this was the case even if they had bought the land in good faith. Others, however, have seen their homes demolished. This was the case if the municipality decided the land was needed for expanding roads. Some of those who have lost their homes had lived in their houses for many years and have been left without shelter. Moreover, not all who lost their homes to the commission were compensated, which makes moving all the more difficult.
One Kabuli to lose her home is Sahar. She was widowed in one of the suicide attacks that struck Kabul during the Republic and now heads her family – four little girls and her elderly parents – in the Hawa Shanasi area near Kabul Airport in PD9. Her father, she said, is very old and can no longer work and his government pension has stopped. She also lost her office job with the coming of the Emirate. They now have no income – and no home. Last year, she said the municipality destroyed the home her family had lived in for 40 years because of road development:
At first, the municipal officers came and told us that the government was obliged to pay us to cover the cost of our house and land. They asked us for property documents. When people presented the documents of their houses to the Kabul municipality, they reviewed and checked them and then said: “The land belongs to the government, so we won’t pay you anything for it. We’ll only pay you for the house you built there.”
Exacerbating all her difficulties was the extremely tight deadline they were given to evacuate their homes – just 15 days – and the fact that hers was one of more than 500 households who had been living in the neighbourhood, all needing to move. (The municipality said it gave them six months to leave.) “There were just no houses in our area to rent,” said Mursal, “or the rent was excessively high.” For a whole month, she said she went from street to street and house to house, looking for an affordable house to rent, but could not find one. When the deadline was over, she said she tried to get the municipality to give her a stay of execution, but they refused. She had gone, in a matter of days [or weeks], from homeowner to homeless and in desperate need of somewhere, urgently, to rent:
Eventually, I found a two-room, mud-built house in a remote area at a high rent. Such a house would not have been rented for more than 2,000 afghanis [USD 28] during the Republic, but I had to pay 5,000 [USD 71]. I had no choice. Even then, the owners said they’d only rent us the house if I paid six months’ rent in advance. I begged them to accept two months and finally they agreed.
All 500 families made homeless, she said, were like her own, poor people who had lived in Hawa Shanasi for a long time and built their houses with a lot of difficulty. She asked the officials about the promised compensation, she said: “They told me, ‘We don’t have any budget now. When there is money, we’ll give it to you.’ … Now I’m wondering what to do. I’m a widow and in charge of my family. There’s no man in our family to work.” Sahar and her family have had to move twice. She was evicted the first time because she could not pay the rent and did not have the proper paperwork (more on this below). Her children, she said, now have to go without enough food because they have to prioritise the rent.
Another interviewee, Sayed Ikram, who was also living in Hawa Shanasi and saw his home destroyed, said that, according to the law, the municipality must pay compensation first, before it demolishes people’s houses. (According to Articles 2 and 8 of the Kabul municipal law, the municipality must pay and acquire property first, and then it can start the demolition.) Ikram complained that acquisition forms were not given out properly: some people received them and some did not, but even those who filled out the forms have yet to be compensated. Even so, the municipality went ahead and destroyed their houses.
In his case, he said, people were given neither enough time to move nor paid what was owed them. “Our request,” he said, “is to receive the money or land they promised us as soon as possible so we can use it to support our lives or buy a house elsewhere.”
Ikram and Sahar appear not to be alone. Other residents have spoken to the media about unpaid compensation (see, for example, Tolonews report here). However, a representative of Kabul municipality, Nematullah Barakzai, pledged that all those who were eligible for compensation would be paid in full. “Over the past year, during 2023, 2,398 properties have been expropriated, and compensation for more than a 1,000 of these properties has been paid out … [with] more than 1.5 billion afghanis already distributed to the people. We have also allocated another half a billion afghanis for this same purpose,” he said during Kabul Municipality’s 2024 accountability session on 12 September.[2] He did, however, stress:
If the land is government land, it’s undoubtedly the government’s property and cannot be acquired under any circumstances. In special cases, if necessary, payments will be made to those whose houses have been damaged. If the land’s private, apart from paying for the building, compensation is also given for the land.
Why are rents and house prices increasing?
Supply and demand
In Afghanistan, there is no rent control – something many interviewees, like Ahmad Shah and Rahmatullah above, complained about. Property dealer, Haji Baryali, of Qala-ye Fathullah in the 10th district of Kabul city said there was nothing estate agents could do about rising rents either:
House rents have been increasing every year. The owners set the rent as they wish and no government body has the right to interfere. Property dealers have nothing to do with this either. They only have consulting roles and sign contracts between landlords and tenants according to the law and real estate policy.
Instead, the market – supply and demand – determines real estate prices and rents. Demand for homes in the capital has surged, said Barylai, because more Afghans want to live in the city – and that is a long-term trend:
More than 70 per cent of the people who fled Afghanistan to neighbouring countries in the 1980s and 1990s were rural people. But [in exile], they lived in cities, in urban areas, and when they returned to Afghanistan, they started living in cities here. Some people still living in the [Afghan] countryside have also moved to Kabul city, which has also pushed rents up.
Baryalai said that migration to Kabul was again pushing up demand for houses. Baryalai and many other interviewees pointed to a surge of people, including Taleban, coming from the countryside to the cities. Sayed Hamidullah commented that “people are trying to come to the city and live here because there’s no work in the provinces and rural areas. Their economic situation is very bad. They have come to the city. Everyone is busy in the city trying to find something for their family to eat.” There are also returnees forced to leave Pakistan who are coming to Kabul (almost three-quarters of a million in the year up to the end of September, according to the International Organisation for Migration, IOM). One contact pointed to another trend, of Afghans living abroad who have second passports returning.
All interviewees, including Baryalai, pointed to Taleban employees and “the new authorities” coming to live in Kabul as another factor pushing up demand for housing and contributing to the hike in rents. Estate agent Aminullah said: “Most Taleban authorities have two, three or even four wives and they rent a separate house for each,” driving up rents more generally, he claimed, and driving down supply. Mursal said the Taleban “pay more rent than other people and therefore rents have gone up again.” Rahmatullah in Yekeh Tut area in PD 9 also claimed that Taleban are bringing their families to Kabul and “can pay high rents, but we are jobless, so how can we pay rent and provide for our families?”
Estate agent Aminullah said that, in general, following the first bleak year after the takeover, the economic outlook had improved and rich people had begun to invest again. Most of the NGOs also resumed their activities, he said, and houses that had been empty, especially in Qala-ye Fathullah, Shahr-e Naw, Wazir Akbar Khan and Shirpur, were now rented. All this drove up property prices and rents.
Bureaucracy makes it harder to move
Ahmad Shah also pointed to another driver of the rent rises. More stringently enforced bureaucracy was making it more difficult to move, so once a person was in a house, they would swallow rent increases rather than try to find a cheaper home to rent:[3]
To rent a home, you have to have a passport-e sahawi or you have to apply for one, and two people have to guarantee you and you have to give it to the relevant police district and the property dealer. If someone doesn’t have a passport-e sahawi, they can’t rent a place to live elsewhere. That’s why many people don’t move. They keep living in the same house even if the rent is very high. Once someone rents a house, they don’t leave it. Because if you move to a new area, you must bring a guarantee from the house-owner where you used to live and the wakil-e guzar [head of the neighbourhood] and police district should confirm you lived in that area and that you didn’t commit any crime there.
There is also another form for changing your location, with permission from the police district. The relevant district and the wakil-e guzar must confirm that you’ve lived there and for how long. They must also confirm that you haven’t committed any crime. You also need to explain in the form why you want to leave that area and this too has to be confirmed by the old police district and the wakil-e guzar. After that, they will send your form to the wakil-e guzar in the new area where you want to live.
The passport-e sahawi system also existed under the Republic, but was not implemented so seriously. Ahmad said its rigorous implementation has “created a lot of problems for people. On the one hand, there’s unemployment and on the other hand, there are high house rents, these relocation forms and the challenges of getting guarantees – it’s all very hard for people.”
This system hit Sahar badly. She was forced to leave the neighbourhood where her family had lived for four decades and everyone knew them and then move twice, needing a new passport-e sahawi each time: “It’s very problematic because if you move to an area where you don’t know anyone,” she said, “they don’t guarantee you and you can’t rent.”
Demolitions, the Kabul master plan and supply-side problems
After the IEA established a special court in 2022 and banned construction on state land, many settlements built during the Republic, as well as land that had been seized and sold to the people by powerful figures in the past, were declared state-owned (read examples of rulings here and here). The IEA appears to have different responses to this in different areas. It has rented some houses back to their old owners, while destroying some houses built on state land. (It should be noted that the Amir has also reserved for himself the right to give away state property, including land and property.)[4]
The demolition of homes built on state land may also be affecting the supply side of housing in the capital. According to Kabul Municipality representative Barakzai, the municipality has expropriated almost 2,400 properties in the past year. Whether these were also destroyed or just taken over and rented back to the old owners, as the decree setting up the land-grabbing commission demands (text here), he did not say (see his interview with Salam Watandar here).
Demolitions may only hurt the total supply side of housing marginally, but can still be significant locally, especially in working-class neighbourhoods, as in Sahar’s case. Key neighbourhoods affected by demolitions are Qasba in PD15, Sar Kotal-e Khairkhana in PD17, Hawa Shanasi in PD9), Kart-e Naw in PD8, Dasht-e Barchi in PD13, Kot-e Sangi in PD5 and Kompani in PD5. However, one of the most upmarket neighbourhoods has also come under the commission’s scrutiny. In late November 2024, it declared that more than 60 hectares had been declared state land in Shepur, according to media, including Ariana News. “The Islamic Emirate claimed,” reported Ariana, “that no documentation had been provided by occupants to prove private ownership of the parcels of land and instead the area had been developed ‘arbitrarily and against planned designs.’”
Sherpur was where then Minister of Defence Fahim Qasim ordered the bulldozing of poor people’s homes built on ministry land in 2003 and then redistributed plots to commanders, cabinet ministers and other well-connected individuals, about half of whom were from his faction, Shura-ye Nizar, which had captured Kabul in 2001.[5] It was in one of the mansions built on this land where al-Qaida leader Aiman al-Zawahri was living when the United States killed him in a drone attack on 31 July 2022 (see AAN reporting here).
Estate agent Aminullah in PD 10 said the commission’s actions and orders were having an impact on the housing supply, and not just because of the demolitions. All real estate brokers have been banned, he said, from buying and selling land and houses built on what the land-grabbing commission has decreed is usurped state land. No real estate agent is allowed to buy or sell houses in areas that are not in the municipality’s master plan (see Fabrizio Foschini’s backgrounder on the Kabul master plan ‘Kabul Unpacked: A Geographical Guide to a Metropolis In The Making’). The strict adherence to the Kabul master plan, said Aminullah, has implications for the housing supply, as it was pushing down the supply and helping to drive up rents and prices.[6] Estate agent Hamidullah, in the Kart-e Naw area in PD8 of Kabul agreed:
Kabul municipality doesn’t allow building houses in areas, which are not in its master plan. In the past, people used to build houses in those areas and there were a lot of one-storey buildings and families were living there. Then, when their family members were increasing, they were either getting separated and living in different houses or were changing their old houses to two-storey buildings. However, now no one has the right to build or construct anything. Only the people who live in areas that are based on the master plan can build houses with the permission of the municipality. Otherwise, they can’t build until further notice. This also caused the prices of houses and rents to increase.
The municipality’s policy was outlined by Kabul Municipality representative Barakzai at a press conference on 5 August 2023, that the municipality was indeed preventing the construction of homes and other development in the state land or area. He added: “Construction is ongoing in Kabul City, but the municipality does not allow construction on government and usurped properties, as well as unplanned areas.” (Kabul Municipality’s reports can be read here and here). Barakzai, speaking to RTA on 20 November 2024 about road and house-building, also outlined the procedure for those wanting to build:
First, permission should be obtained from Kabul Municipality. Second, the land should be specified where it is, whether it is government land or private and if it is in a green area. Then, the municipality will allow him to work and the person can build a house there. If it is government land or a green area, the municipality will never let any construction there.
Kabul municipality has pushed back on criticism, including in apparent response to a hard-hitting 18 November article in The Guardian alleging that Kabul’s ‘regeneration’ programme had made thousands of people homeless and had an ethnic bias. In a series of tweets published on 24 November, it insisted that compensation was being given and proper procedures followed: “The citizens whose properties are being purchased for new road building projects are also notified by Kabul Municipality to complete the administrative stages of their paperwork as soon as possible,” it said, “and to contact Kabul Municipality to claim their rights.” It described the municipality as “a vast service-provider administration that implements its objectives in accordance with balanced development principles” and said that Kabul is the “home of all Afghans.”
Conclusion
In 2021, the Islamic Emirate took over a capital city that, in terms of houses built legally, was a mess. According to estimates by the World Bank, already in 2004, informal settlements, that is, houses built outside of the master plan and in most cases on state-claimed land, accounted for 70 per cent of residential areas and were where 80 per cent of the population in Kabul. The Republic neither tried to demolish them nor discouraged new building, which in fact continued up to 2021. Nor did it recognise residents’ legal ownership or uniformly expand public services (including healthcare, schools, sanitation, transport) to those areas. This knotty problem was widely perceived and debated already under the Republic, but attempts at addressing it were frustrated by the rivalry between the Kabul Municipality and the Ministry of Urban Development Affairs, the economic interests of powerful actors and the difficulty of coping with the high numbers of returnees and new urban residents.[7] It is possible, then, that the amount of land in Kabul that the land-grabbing commission has thus far declared to belong to the state, on which properties may or may not then be demolished, is the tip of an iceberg.
The informal settlements have compounded Kabul’s sanitation and transportation problems because the settlements were allowed to expand without the municipality providing services. It seems the IEA is keen on tackling transport, at least as far as building roads, which have been the driver of most of the demolitions so far.
Even so, the land-grabbing commission’s actions and orders are but one factor, and not the most important one, driving up the cost of real estate in Kabul. Increased demand for urban housing, hottest in the Afghan capital, is outpacing supply, pushing up house prices and rents. At the same time, bureaucratic procedures are exacerbating the tendency of sitting tenants to try to stay where they and accept any rent increases because moving is so difficult.
As rents and house prices have skyrocketed, anxiety is growing among many citizens: How can they pay the rent and feed their children when paid work is scarce and living expenses are soaring? Kabul Municipality insists that “Afghanistan is a unified nation, and Kabul City is home to all Afghans.” This, however, stands in sharp contrast to the realities faced by the city’s poorest residents. For them, the gap between the haves and the have-nots in Afghanistan’s capital seems to be widening, and their voices are yet to be listened to.
Edited by Roxanna Shapour
References
| ↑1 | Gerawi is an agreement whereby a person pays a large amount of money to the house owner for using his or her house, for example, for a year and the house owner repays the money if the person leaves the house after a year. |
|---|---|
| ↑2 | More recent figures have come from the head of Kabul Municipality’s Acquisition Department, Abdul Matin Hanif, who tweeted on 24 November that the mmunicipality “has disbursed around AFN 2 billion (USD 28,985,507) to the 2000 residents whose properties have been acquired over the last three years, and this number is expanding on a daily basis.” |
| ↑3 | Ahmad Shah refers to a passport-e sahawi, (seen here). It is a form which wakil-e guzars and property dealers give to residents [or people moving] to fill in and submit to their district police station. Only after receiving the form back will the owner or property dealer rent out the home. The form shows the logos of the Ministry of Interior, Kabul Municipality and General Department of Intelligence and is in three parts: the house owner must enter his or her name and all the details of the house address in the first part; the tenant must enter their name and the details of any family living with them; and two personal guarantors for the tenant must sign the third part. |
| ↑4 | In October 2021, the amir banned land-grabbing for a second time (for land whose ownership was unclear). The decree also said that the amir, “Based on necessity and expediency, can give [such land] to a member (of the Muslim community) as property.” The decree drew a parallel with what it said was the amir’s right to “withdraw from the public coffer [bait ul-maal]” and presumably give money to someone, again because of expediency. In March 2023, the ban on officials selling land, or transferring land to individuals or corporations, was repeated, unless there was a specific decree from the amir (for the texts of the decrees up to March 2023 and an accompanying report, (see here and here). |
| ↑5 | The opulent homes built on the seized land became known as ‘poppy palaces’ because of the alleged links of their owners with the narcotics trade. They became, as Joanna Nathan writing for the Middle East Institute (MEI) described, “monuments to the powerlessness of ordinary Afghans and a daily reminder to Kabulis of the impunity of the new administration and international inaction.” For more on this, see our 2023 report into the Emirate’s land-grabbing commission, which includes a list of those receiving plots compiled by the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC), published by MEI, with added biographical information from AAN. See also a September 2003 statement by Special Rapporteur on Adequate Housing and this Watandar Plus video report on the ongoing demolitions in Sherpur). |
| ↑6 | The distinction is underwritten by property owners having different legal documents: those whose lands or houses are part of the master plan have legal deeds (qabala-ye sharayi); those in areas which are not part of the municipality master plan have customary deeds (qabala-ye urfi). |
| ↑7 | For more on informal housing under the Republic, see this 2017 USIP report by AAN’s Fabrizio Foschini. |