Youth Housing Occupants Evicted in Hama Without Alternative

On April 6, the Hama Governorate Police Command, in coordination with the General Housing Establishment (GHE), carried out an eviction operation targeting 170 illegal occupants of residential units in the Youth Housing Project buildings on Dhi Qar Street in the Al-Hader neighbourhood, north of Hama city.

A committee formed by the Hama Housing Directorate had reviewed the legal status of these occupants in February, held meetings with them, issued warnings, and granted a two-month deadline for eviction, Engineer Fouad Dardar, head of what he named as the GHE’s Hama Group, told The Syria Report.

The April 6 eviction was executed without offering any assistance or alternative housing to the illegal occupants, despite their lack of any other shelter. Mr Dardar said that the ministry is reviewing some of these cases to provide help “within its available capabilities,” but noted that “the issue requires resources that exceed the government’s current capacity, and plans and proposals are being drafted for a comprehensive solution to the housing crisis in the city.”

Syria has several social housing programmes aimed at providing low- to middle-income housing for subscribers through affordable payment schemes. Among these are the youth housing projects launched in 2002. Typically, these projects are managed and executed by construction entities affiliated with the Ministry of Public Works and Housing. In Hama, social housing projects are concentrated in the Dhi Qar, Al-Wafa, and Al-Amal suburbs.

The illegal occupants in the Dhi Qar project fall into two categories: the first includes internally displaced persons who fled opposition-controlled areas in Idlib after 2012, along with families of former Assad regime military members. The second group consists of individuals who took advantage of the security vacuum following Assad’s collapse in December 2024 and occupied apartments abandoned by supporters of the former regime fearing retaliatory acts. Most of these new occupants are themselves displaced persons who returned to Hama after years of residing in northern Syria. Many originally lived in informal neighbourhoods like Mashaa Wadi Al-Joz and Mashaa Al-Arbaeen, where homes were damaged during the Syrian war – or they had no housing to return to in the first place.

The eviction came in response to complaints from the rightful apartment owners in the project, who have been waiting for over two decades to receive their homes after subscribing to the project. The Youth Housing Project in Dhi Qar neighbourhood was launched in 2002, and the apartments were meant to be handed over to subscribers in 2011. The project includes 240 apartments distributed across buildings 3461, 3462, and 3678. 

Beyond the common challenges facing social housing in Syria – such as limited funding, lack of transparency, and rising property costs – this particular project faced technical hurdles. The executing agency, the General Company for Building and Construction, discovered water cavities beneath the site. This required draining the area by digging artificial wells and re-conducting soil mechanics studies, which increased costs and delayed completion.

In 2011, construction work on the project came to a halt, and regime forces repurposed the site as a compound, coinciding with a liquidity crisis and the termination of contracts with defaulting contractors, according to Fouad Dardar.

Most subscribers had paid off their installments and signed apartment allocation contracts with the General Housing Establishment between February and March 2022. Allocation refers to a contract between the subscriber and the Establishment, specifying each party’s obligations. The contract includes the apartment’s location and specifications and is documented with the Ministry of Public Works and Housing. However, allocation does not mean that the building is completed or ready for handover. Still, it serves as a form of ownership deed, provided the remaining financial obligations are fulfilled.

After the completion of internal and external finishing works in the first half of 2024, apartments were officially subdivided and registered in the names of the rightful owners, making them ready for occupancy. Nevertheless, the apartments were not handed over, despite repeated promises from the GHE – up until the fall of the Assad regime on December 8, 2024. The subdivision process refers to the partitioning of the original property (in this case, the entire project land) into new, individually registered properties under the names of the respective owners.