News
NA Committee Orders Fast-Track Completion of Delayed Islamabad Housing Projects
By Mariam Khan
Real Estate Analyst
5 min read
The National Assembly Standing Committee on Housing and Works, meeting under Chairman Maulana Abdul Ghafoor Haideri, raised serious concerns over delays in major federal housing projects and directed authorities to accelerate completion while protecting allottees' interests. The projects specifically reviewed included the Lifestyle Residency Apartments and the I-12 Flats project in Islamabad.
Lifestyle Residency's Own Documented History
As covered previously by milkiyat.com regarding the protest by retired federal employees over Lifestyle Residency's delays, this project was launched in 2016 on government owned land in G-13, with a development contract reportedly awarded to EHFPRO and an original completion target of just 36 months, meaning possession was expected by 2019. More than seven years past that original deadline, many allottees, a substantial share of them retired federal government employees, remain without possession of homes they have already paid into. This committee session sits alongside a separate, parallel track of concern, Housing Minister Mian Riaz Hussain Pirzada separately expressed grave concern over the same project's delays while chairing FGEHA's 50th Executive Board Meeting, noting he had repeatedly been required to answer for the project's lack of progress before parliamentary committees and other oversight forums.
What I-12 Flats Actually Refers To
The I-12 Flats project under review is the Pakistan Housing Authority's apartment scheme in Sector I-12/1, comprising 3,200 housing units in total. According to PHA's own official project page, the project's status remains listed simply as under construction, without a confirmed completion date given.
Why I-12 as a Whole Carries a Genuinely Troubling Longer History
Beyond the specific PHA apartment project, Sector I-12 as a whole has a documented history of extreme delay that provides important context for why this committee treated the area's housing projects with such urgency. Separate from the PHA apartments, CDA's own I-12 plot allocation, comprising 6,040 residential plots across 745.87 acres, has left allottees, overwhelmingly from Islamabad's middle and lower middle class, waiting in some cases for more than three decades for possession. Allottees have described the human cost starkly, with one telling reporters that many allottees have died waiting for their dream of owning a home to be completed. Compounding the delay, affected residents have alleged that CDA has been filling uneven, cavity areas of the sector's terrain with garbage rather than proper fill material, raising genuine concerns about long term land stability, hygiene, and the sector's basic liveability once eventually developed.
Why This Committee Session Matters Beyond a Routine Review
This is not the first oversight body to raise these same concerns in recent weeks. A separate Senate Standing Committee on Housing and Works, chaired by Senator Nasir Mehmood, reviewed Green Enclave-I's own prolonged delay just days earlier, during which FGEHA disclosed that a third party assessment found only around 52 percent of that project's work actually completed despite payments already released, and confirmed the project would take a further 18 months to complete once outstanding cost approvals are secured. Taken together with this National Assembly committee's review of Lifestyle Residency and I-12 Flats, federal housing project delays in Islamabad are now drawing sustained, near simultaneous scrutiny from both houses of Parliament within the same short period.
What the Committee Actually Ordered
The committee directed authorities to accelerate completion of both reviewed projects while specifically protecting allottees' interests throughout that acceleration process, reflecting a now familiar pattern across these various oversight sessions, project delays are acknowledged, and stated urgency and accountability are demanded, while binding, enforceable completion deadlines have historically proven difficult for authorities to actually meet.
What Remains Unresolved
No specific, binding completion timeline for either the Lifestyle Residency Apartments or the I-12 Flats project was confirmed as an outcome of this committee session. Given the documented, multi-year, and in I-12's case multi-decade pattern of missed deadlines already on record for federal housing projects in Islamabad, readers and affected allottees should treat this latest directive as renewed pressure rather than a guarantee that either project's timeline will now genuinely accelerate.
What This Means for Allottees of Both Projects
Allottees of Lifestyle Residency and I-12 Flats specifically should treat this committee's directive as confirmation that their situation remains under active, high level parliamentary scrutiny, while continuing to document all payment records and correspondence with FGEHA and PHA respectively in case further formal escalation becomes necessary. Given I-12's documented, decades long history and the specific, serious allegations around garbage being used as land fill in the sector, allottees and prospective buyers connected to any I-12 property should treat land stability and site preparation quality as a genuine, additional due diligence concern distinct from the more commonly discussed question of completion timing alone.
What This Means for Prospective Buyers of Federal Housing Authority Projects
Prospective buyers considering any FGEHA or PHA administered housing project in Islamabad should treat the documented histories of Lifestyle Residency, Green Enclave-I, and I-12 collectively as a clear, evidence based pattern, official launch timelines and stated completion targets for federally sponsored housing schemes have repeatedly proven unreliable, sometimes by a decade or more. Independent verification of a specific project's actual, current construction completion percentage, rather than its original marketing timeline, should be treated as essential before committing funds to any comparable federal housing scheme.