Poverty’s tightness.

Fatima and six others live in two six-meter rooms with a four-meter courtyard. The rooms are made of cement blocks and have thin and uneven layers of plaster on them. The ceiling is made of aluminum sheets, and every time the wind blows, Fatima’s seven-member family fears for their shelter to collapse.

Every morning, Qobad, Fatemeh’s elderly husband, ties plastic buckets to his Honda 125 motorbike and rides to the tomato paste factory; factories that are located fifteen to twenty minutes away from their home in Alonak.

The factory owner has allowed Qobad and his neighbors to bring water to the factory. Right next to Fatemeh’s house, there is a strong electric pole. On the body of the pole, there are black labels and a picture of a human skull can be seen. Qobad has pulled several electric wires from the giant pole to the crane; wires that are now fixed near the ceiling of the room with nails and ties.

Fatima says that until four years ago, their family was eight people, but an illegal power line took the life of their three-year-old grandson. Her son-in-law has left her daughter and three children years ago; he was unemployed and addicted and one day he left and never came back.

Now his daughter lives with two children in a small house in Alonak.

Qobad is a furniture maker and the others have turned to home businesses to make money. They peel beans, make gift boxes, attach curtain hooks, or clean vegetables and fish for restaurants; basically any job they can get their hands on. But their wages are low. They only receive three thousand tomans for peeling one kilogram of beans. With this money, in Iran, they can only buy a piece of bread; the same bread that the government keeps saying they give subsidies for, but these subsidies have put the government in a budget deficit.

Fatima’s son is short, with messy black eyebrows and eyes that have a hint of white in their darkness. There is extra flesh on the back of his hand. Fatima says he is depressed and has attempted suicide once.

Fatima has planted red and green flowers in small pots that are arranged in front of the door of her house, using recycled rubber from worn out car tires and rusty oil cans collected from the waste recycling site. She says, “It’s good for our spirits.”

She smiles and quickly hides her teeth’s gums under her black headscarf.

Fatima does not like to talk to a journalist of her own age. With the pride that she tries not to be humiliated, she says, “We are not poor! My father had a lot of agricultural lands and everyone knows him in Aligudarz; but our agricultural wells dried up and we lost the value of our lands and were forced to come to Tehran.”

…and gathers her children and leaves.

Heavy rents for Alonkas.

Fatima’s family and their neighbors do not live for free in Alonkas; they are tenants of landlords whom they do not know except for a few account numbers. They must pay a monthly rent of 1.2 to 1.6 million tomans for their Alonkas.

According to Iranian law, the government does not provide water, electricity, and gas connections to informal settlements, unless the settlements have been inhabited for a long time. However, as soon as water, electricity, and gas connections are established, the land grabbers evict the inhabitants and build towers and malls on the seized land.

Boundaries.

Forty.

Iran’s cities are experiencing a percentage of inflation.

This is a snapshot of the life of an Alonkeshin family in Tehran’s “Morteza Gard”; one of the poorest families in Iran with no access to clean drinking water, electricity or gas.

According to the latest official reports, approximately thirty to forty percent of Iran’s urban population live in such spaces.

According to the Ministry of Roads and Urban Development, approximately 35 to 40 percent of Iran’s urban population lives in informal settlements. Abbas Akhoundi, the Minister of Roads and Urban Development under President Hassan Rouhani, stated at the “Sustainable Urban Reconstruction in Sistan and Baluchestan” conference on July 6, 2017, that around 35 to 41 percent of Iran’s urban population lives in inadequate conditions.

Furthermore, according to the latest available statistics on the income and expenses of different income deciles, the average monthly expense for urban households in the year 99 (2020-2021) was five hundred and fifty million rials, based on data from the Statistical Center of Iran.

This cost is estimated to be an average of 1,400,000,000,000 Iranian Rials for the first decade and 14,820,000,000,000 Iranian Rials for the tenth decade.

This amount is no longer sufficient for the Alonkineshins and almost all of it is lost due to the rent of those Alonkas.

In fact, if all members of the family, even small children, work, paying the rent of the owners of Alonkas is almost impossible.

Twenty-five.

Hot meat; monthly consumption per capita of poor people in Iran.

The poorest income deciles in Iran only eat twenty-five grams of red meat per month; approximately equivalent to the weight of a small butter for breakfast or two pieces of meat.

In the winter of 99, Mosi Shahbazi, the former director of the Office of Economic Studies at the Center for Parliamentary Research, told Tasnim that the monthly per capita consumption of red meat in rural areas has reached 10 to 25 grams and the poorest Iranians only consume about 300 grams of meat per year.

The main source of strength for Iranian poor people is bread.

In April 2016, Hassan Hashemi, the former Minister of Health, stated at a meeting of university presidents of medical sciences that the first four decades do not go to the dentist.

On February 10th, 2021, Mojtaba Yousef, a member of the Iranian Parliament, announced in the public session of the Baharestan Building that twenty million Iranians are living on the margins and in informal settlements.

The government states that it will pay a subsidy of four hundred thousand tomans for each person in the first ten days, but inflation has been so severe that the value of this four hundred thousand tomans subsidy in the first ten days is equivalent to the value of a forty-five hundred and fifty thousand tomans subsidy in the early days of Ahmadinejad’s government.

Despite all of this, the Iranian government does not publish accurate information about the poverty situation in Iran and claims that the lack of sufficient data in this area has made the process of removing subsidies for the wealthy and collecting taxes challenging.