cooperative_housing – Syria Report

The Cooperative Housing Directorate (CHD), part of the Ministry of Public Works and Housing, is responsible for regulating the cooperative housing sector. This sector is financed by housing cooperatives to provide affordable housing for their members. Since its establishment in 2008, the directorate has evolved, transitioning from working alongside the General Union of Housing Cooperatives (GUHC) to replacing it in 2019.

The cooperative housing sector complements the social housing programmes implemented by state-owned construction companies. Housing cooperatives often rely on purchasing land from the state at low prices to build homes for their members. Additionally, building materials are sold to cooperatives at reduced prices. Members of cooperative housing schemes are treated similarly to those in social housing in terms of payment installments and allocations. However, an individual can benefit from only one of these options, and only once in their lifetime.

The first legislation to regulate various types of associations was Legislative Decree No. 65 of 1950. During the Syrian-Egyptian union, Law No. 93 of 1958 was enacted to impose Egyptian cooperative law, which linked all cooperatives, including housing cooperatives, to the then Ministry of Social Affairs and Labour.

In 1961, the GUHC was established to act as a syndicate for housing cooperatives. In 1981, Cooperative Housing Law No. 13 was issued to regulate their operations and establish the GUHC as a mediator between housing cooperatives and the Ministry of Housing.

Law No. 13 of 1981 stipulated that the Ministry of Housing is responsible for supervising and monitoring the cooperative housing sector, including reviewing the activities of housing cooperatives and the GUHC to ensure compliance with applicable laws and regulations. The law also mandated Ministry of Housing employees to attend general meetings of housing cooperatives, defined their roles in overseeing the cooperatives’ activities, and specified their compensation for attending these meetings, which is to be borne by the respective cooperatives.

Law No. 17 of 2007 amended Law 13 of 1981, introducing the Cooperative Housing Directorate of the Ministry of Housing for the first time. However, its establishment was delayed until the issuance of the Ministry of Housing Decision No. 616 in 2008. The CHD’s role is to oversee and regulate the cooperative housing sector. The Directorate shares supervisory duties over housing cooperatives with the GUHC.

Despite numerous challenges, the cooperative housing sector has managed to build approximately 220,000 housing units over the past decades, compared to only 77,000 units constructed by social housing projects.

In 2011, Decree No. 99 on cooperative housing was issued, abolishing all preceding laws and enhancing the role of the CHD in monitoring and supervising the GUHC and housing cooperatives. During this period, the impact of the Syrian war, economic deterioration, and the loss of control by the government over parts of the country significantly affected cooperative operations, leading to the shutdown of many cooperatives. The number of cooperatives declined from 3,159 in 2013 to around 2,500 in 2019.

Legislative Decree No. 37 of 2019 permanently dissolved the GUHC, transferring its duties, functions, and movable and immovable properties to the CHD within the Ministry of Housing. Following this, the Ministry of Housing launched an extensive campaign to dissolve and liquidate hundreds of inactive housing cooperatives, those without actual building projects, or those that had ceased operations.

The tasks of the CHD include overseeing and regulating all decisions of housing cooperatives, including the dissolution and liquidation of associations and the protection of cooperative members’ rights. The Directorate also reviews proposals and decisions from cooperatives, manages financing for beneficiaries of cooperative properties, and ensures that housing projects are completed within specified timeframes.

The Directorate is headquartered in Damascus and headed by the Director of Cooperative Housing in Syria. It has regional branches in the governorates, each overseeing the housing cooperatives within their geographic jurisdiction, led by a General Director of CHD for the governorate. Each directorate consists of several departments, including the Administrative and Financial Department, the Supervision, Control, and Follow-up Department, the Statistics and Information Department, and the Computer Division.

As a result of the dissolution, liquidation, and merger decisions led by the CHD, the number of cooperatives decreased to 1,860 in 2024, of which 1,481 are active. According to official figures, there are still around 800,000 applicants in the cooperative housing sector, with 94,000 cooperative housing units currently under construction.

The dissolution and liquidation of cooperatives have been a loss for the applicants, as the laws governing them only return the amounts paid by applicants in Syrian pounds upon liquidation. In addition to losing their housing, this also means that applicants lose the previous installments they have paid, due to high inflation and the depreciation of the Syrian pound.

The dissolution of the GUHC and its replacement by the CHD have not significantly changed the situation. The dissolution and liquidation of inactive cooperatives were not accompanied by the establishment of new cooperatives, and there have been no reports of housing allocations to applicants since 2020. The CHD allocated building plots to large cooperatives to assist with housing projects in rural Damascus, such as Al-Fayhaa suburb, most of which was allocated to housing cooperatives, although none of them completed the construction works. These cooperatives were supposed to build 11,000 apartments in Al-Fayhaa suburb by 2020, which has not happened to date.

Issued last June, Zoning Plan No. 106 for the Jobar neighbourhood of Damascus does not allocate any plot to rebuild the Al-Mualameen Tower, which regime forces destroyed in 2015. Record No. 53 in the Land Registry, on which the tower is listed, does not receive any mention in Zoning Plan No. 106.

The 12-storey Al-Mualameen Tower was located on the outskirts of Jobar and overlooked the nearby Al-Abasiyeen Garages, the commercial district, and Al-Abasiyeen Square. The Housing Cooperative Society owns the tower for Teachers and Educators in Damascus, hence the building’s name (“mualameen” means “teachers” in Arabic). The government granted the cooperative a permit on June 17, 1974, and it began constructing the tower in the 1980s, on a plot of land corresponding to the real estate record No. 53. In 2004, the cooperative finally handed the apartments over to applicants per the housing cooperative system. The tower was located in a zoned real estate area and was divided into individual apartments listed within the Land Registry under the names of the apartment owners.

Cooperative housing is linked to social housing programs implemented by Syria’s public authorities. Housing cooperative societies were all previously affiliated with the General Union of Cooperative Housing, which dissolved under Decree No. 37 of 2019, 58 years after it was established. The Ministry of Public Works and Housing took on the union’s roles.

The apartment owners in Al-Mualameen Tower are state employees working in education. For them, subscribing to apartments in the building was the most significant investment in their professional lives, serving as a reward for the end of their service and an asset to pass down to their children, one owner told The Syria Report.

The biggest problem with Al-Mualameen Tower and other housing cooperative projects in general was the more than two-decade delay in receiving the apartments. Applicants for Al-Mualameen didn’t receive their apartments until 2004 after most had already retired and finished paying off their payments for the housing. Worse, the newfound apartment owners immediately had to repair and restore the homes due to poor construction.

The tower’s height and location made it a strategic military point, contested between regime and opposition forces. Rebels seized the building and occupied it between 2013 and 2015. During this time, the regime tried and failed to recapture it despite bombing the tower with airstrikes, artillery shells and rockets. Then, in February 2015, regime forces dug a tunnel under the tower at 16 metres deep and 250 metres long, set up explosives inside, then detonated them, turning the building into a pile of rubble.

In late June 2022, the Damascus governorate issued Detailed Zoning Plan No. 106 for Jobar and fielded objections from relevant rightsholders. The detailed zoning plan did not observe any new plot of land for rights holders in the teachers’ cooperative, which implies classifying the destroyed tower as an unlicensed building within an informal settlement. The Syria Report could not confirm whether any of the rights holders in Al-Mualameen Tower filed any objections to Detailed Zoning Plan No. 106 within the one-month deadline to do so.

The zoning area in Jobar is subject to Planning and Urban Development Law No. 23 of 2015, which gave administrative authorities the choice to employ Law No. 23, the Expropriation Law, or the Real Estate Development and Investment Law when re-zoning areas containing informal housing or rehabilitating areas damaged by natural catastrophes and war.

Law No. 23 stipulates that, as part of the zoning process, an administrative unit forms a compulsory land readjustment committee tasked with giving rights holders their shares of property in the same location as their original properties or nearby. As part of this readjustment process, rights holders within the area undergoing zoning receive plots of land designated for construction within that same area as compensation for losing their original properties. However, the land distributed to the rights holders is often not in the original locations of their properties. Furthermore, up to 40 percent of the surface area of their original properties may be deducted, without compensation, when handing over the new lands.

If rights holders file objections, prove their ownership and obtain new land through compulsory land readjustment, they must then assemble themselves and their allocated plots of land. Rights holders must then build on these properties at their own expense. If a rights holder dies, the inheritance process is carried out in the presence of all their heirs, or at least their legal representatives. Both cases require prior security approval, adding potential complications to proving the existing rights of former Al-Mualameen Tower residents.

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Profile: Cooperative Housing Directorate

New Zoning Plan for Jobar Erases Al-Mualameen Tower