The housing crisis is one of the many crises in Iran under the misogynous mullahs. Destitute men, women, and even children live on the roofs and sleep in buses and cars. These are some of the alarming signs of the housing crisis in the capital.
According to official statistics, the majority of the people of Iran live under the poverty line. Therefore, considering the rising inflation, many people do not afford to rent houses and apartments.
Sleeping in buses is a newly emerged phenomenon and a shocking catastrophe that government institutions, including Tehran’s City Council, ignore as a problem they need to solve. Nasser Amani, a member of Tehran’s City Council, claimed that it was the city’s “goodwill gesture.”
He told a public meeting that Tehran’s municipality had “assigned several buses to shelter those who come to Tehran for medical treatment or administrative work and sleep in the parks.” (The official IRNA news agency – January 4, 2022)
Mehdi Chamran, head of Tehran’s City Council, responded to the public opinion’s reaction to this catastrophic phenomenon. Acknowledging that people sleep in buses instead of their homes, he mentioned proposals to “remove these buses altogether.”
Nasser Amani accused the media of “lying” and “damaging” the clerical regime by reporting the news of homeless people who sleep in buses.
Earlier, a photographer had provided a photo report on this issue for the semi-official ISNA news agency. Since early December, he spent time in these buses to prepare his account. He noticed that many people permanently sleep in these buses.
In part of his report for ISNA, he wrote, “Every night, these people try to catch one of the buses to stay out of the cold and sleep for a few minutes. Women, men, and even children who do not have any shelter fill these buses on these cold nights. Everyone has their own story. However, their common story is that they do not have any homes. They can sleep from the early hours after midnight until 5 a.m. when the first citizens get on the bus. If any of them could pay 25,000 Tomans ($0.93) more, they could go to a motel and sleep in a room (costing 50,000 Tomans or $1.85 a night).”
The mullahs’ shameful rule has forced women to sleep in buses
The women who take refuge from the freezing cold of winter to sleep in buses do not have any homes. They mostly used to sleep under the bridge, on a bench in a park, bus stations, and even in empty graves and underground holes.
These impoverished women get on a bus to have a few hours of sleep in a warm place, but they must change their bus at every end station.
These women prefer to sleep in a bus than to the city’s few warm shelters because they are mistreated and insulted there.
Women’s poverty is an outcome of the clerical regime’s shameful rule. The situation has gotten to the point that women sleep in buses during winter. However, this is not the only catastrophe poverty has brought about for women.
The state-run Fararu website published a story on January 2, 2022, about a teenage girl in Khuzestan. The young woman, 17, had to sell her body to have two hours of cool air conditioning.
