Rural housing poverty and its overcoming priorities in Iran

Housing poverty is not merely a single dimensional issue, but it has multi dimensions in Iranian rural society. In this regard, housing poverty and its overcoming priorities in Iranian rural society are investigated in this study applying a multidimensional approach to housing poverty. In this context, various qualitative housing indicators, poverty indexes and ranking technique by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) were applied to Iranian rural households’ survey data published by the Iranian Statistical Center in 2008 and include economic and demographic information on 19707 households. Results indicate that housing poverty is predominated on the majority (99.980%) of rural households. The most coverage of housing poverty in the Iranian rural society is related to safety dimension (99.812%). Then, utilities and equipments dimension and sewerage system dimension are located and finally, density dimension has the lowest proportion of headcount ratio (12.919%). According to this, insecurity is approximately an epidemic phenomenon among rural households. The poverty gap index indicated that the depth and quality of housing poverty is such that on average the rural households deprive from accessing to almost two-fifth of housing indicators. The poverty gap index in the field of housing security dimension is equal to 83.906%. It shows that the level of accomplished attempts to provide housing security in Iranian rural society is very slight. The rate of poverty gap in utilities and equipments dimension (5.599%) indicates that the depth of housing poverty in this housing dimension is very low, so that rural households have, on average, about 95% of housing furniture and facilities. Therefore, it can be inferred that although based on headcount ratio, the vast majority of rural households (85.934%) do not have completely access to furniture and housing facilities, but based on the poverty gap ratio, the effort of households is on their access to this collection of housing furniture and facilities to reach the highest possible level. The depth of this depriving based on poverty gap index is such that rural households, on average, are excluded from about a quarter of facilities of sewerage system. In the field of density dimension, the poverty gap index is equal to the headcount ratio. So, it can be found that the limitation amount of residential space in rural households is equal to one room per each residential unit, on average. Finally, based on the findings, providing physical security and housing insurance, improving residential density, and providing water network for rural households are the most important strategies to capture housing poverty in these areas