Algeria's Housing Minister Mohamed Nadir Hamimid declared at the opening of an international conference on housing on Wednesday (6 April) that the government plans to construct 1m housing units by 2009 to solve the shortage in the country.
A lack of sufficient housing units has been an ongoing crisis for the government since the early 1980s. A state-run construction sector, inadequate urban planning, strong population growth, limited mortgage financing, and rapid rural-urban migration caused by endemic political violence are factors that led to the problem.
