opinion

Housing problems are to provide people with an elementary and essential condition, but they offer a striking contrast between the social systems.

Unattainable dream

At the end of December last year, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development announced that the homeless people including those who temporarily resided in protective facilities numbered over 770 000.

According to data recently published in the country, including the report on the present national housing situation in 2024 of Harvard University, the house prices and house rent have jumped by 29 percent and 26 percent respectively since 2020.

With the cost of living and inflation continuously going up, it has become a difficult problem for American families to collect enough money to pay the price or rent for houses. The skyrocketing house price is a problem. But more serious is the housing shortage. At present the US is reportedly short of houses for 3.9 million families.

In Europe about 1.2 million people are lodging on the streets.

The number of people wandering the streets has steadily been increasing since 2008 in Europe and it is commonplace for wanderers to live in empty buildings or public places and beg for food.

The report of a women’s human rights delegation of the French Senate in October last year said that about 3 000 women and the equal number of children stay outdoors every night.

It noted that in a hospital many homeless women extended the days of hospital treatment after childbirth. A woman stayed there for 90 days and another woman was hospitalized in the paediatrics department with her baby, it added.

For many people in the US and Europe, “buying a house" is just a dream.

People’s dream and ideal come true

In the DPRK, in which the construction of dwelling houses for providing the people with stable and civilized living conditions is an undertaking to realize the cherished desire of the Workers' Party of Korea, projects have been pushed ahead in a planned manner to properly solve the housing problem of the people across the country in the near future.

In recent years, many houses have been built in Pyongyang every year, including those on newly built Songhwa, Hwasong and Rimhung streets.

"I can hardly believe that such a wonderful new house has been provided to us, worker couple. Whenever we heard the news that the fellow workers of my husband who works at the Pyongyang Thermal Power Station had received new houses, we were envious of them wondering when we would get such a blessing. But today our dream has become a reality and still I feel as if I am dreaming,” said Ro Kum Nyo living in neighbourhood unit No. 9, Hwawon-dong No. 1 of Hwasong District.

As the construction of rural houses has dynamically been stepped up in the provinces as well as in the capital city, happy events of moving into new houses have taken place in succession in different parts of the country.

Farmhouses for more than 80 700 families were built in over 1 500 rural villages in the past three years. Those for 20 000-odd families are now under construction. If the houses to be built this year are put together, another tens of thousands of farmers will reportedly settle in the new houses.

The houses, which the state builds by taking full responsibility and making enormous investment while regarding the housing projects as the most important undertaking, are provided to the workers, farmers and all other working people free of charge.

This is entirely attributable to the people-first politics of the Workers' Party of Korea which shapes the future by investing all the wealth of the country in the people's happiness.

The large-scale housing construction projects undertaken by the Party and state are not aimed at gaining any economic profits, but constitute a noble undertaking to make the wealth of the state and the results of the creative labour of the working masses actually become their wellbeing.

Thanks to the noble outlook of the WPK on the people that it must pick the star in the sky if the people want it, the dream and ideal of the people are becoming a reality in the DPRK.