<No one can deny the estimated role played by the Ministry of Housing to provide affordable housing for a number of citizens, despite our reservations about the slow implementation of its projects because it has not received enough land ... and the issue of not finding enough land to implement projects despite the fact that the Kingdom is the largest Gulf country in terms of area and even exceeds the area of many Arab and European countries, is strange despite the vast area of the Kingdom? The strange thing is that many residents of some old neighborhoods abandon them, despite the availability of services in them and their location in the center of cities, to look for new neighborhoods that may not have all the services, under the pretext of distance from the city center and its noise, where we find new neighborhoods as a result of this demand at high prices, and this behavior has several drawbacks, including reducing the opportunities for other citizens to obtain adequate housing at an appropriate price due to the high prices of housing units, especially in the new neighborhoods.
Unfortunately, we do not think about solutions until after the crises worsen, and then we try to put urgent solutions in an attempt to extinguish the fires, which are therefore not considered radical solutions, because we neglect practical solutions, such as the existence of a huge amount of abandoned housing in the center of several cities that could contribute a reasonable amount to solving the housing crisis as an example of dozens of buildings and basements that were abandoned and neglected by their owners until they became a shelter for criminal users and loose workers, including many buildings in the center of Riyadh, such as Al Batahaa and Al Shamisi neighborhoods and even in some neighborhoods In some high-end neighborhoods, such as the Al-Malaz neighborhood, in which dozens of abandoned buildings and sheds were urgently monitored, so why were such buildings and sheds not exploited after the necessary maintenance in solving even a small part of the housing crisis? The question that imposes itself is whether the competent authorities have inventoried these buildings and sheds? Is there a statistic, even an estimate of the number of abandoned buildings and sheds?
Some time ago, we read about a statistic that reveals hundreds of thousands of empty housing units, in various cities of the Kingdom, isn't that strange?... The housing crisis has been exacerbated by everyone, so efforts must be combined to develop scientific solutions urgently, so as not to aggravate it further.