Thirty years old, one salary, no square metres

The distortion is no Tunisian anomaly. It runs across the Maghreb, and it runs across the world. Here it produces one particular consequence :

a whole generation that does not leave the family home, not out of cultural preference, but out of arithmetic.

Why has the gap between prices and incomes widened ?

Because the two curves stopped tracking one another. Property prices follow construction costs, the scarcity of urban land and the appetite for a safe haven asset. Wages follow collective bargaining, which moves at another speed entirely.

In Tunisia, inflation stood at 5.3 percent in June 2026 according to the National Institute of Statistics (Institut national de la statistique, INS), slightly down from 5.4 percent in May. Core inflation, which strips out food and energy, went the other way and rose to 4.9 percent. The slowdown is real and fragile, and it erases nothing of fifteen years of accumulated drift. On the supply side, the INS records that construction posted the sharpest sectoral decline in the first quarter of 2026, with value added falling 7.1 percent. Less building, in a market already strained, promises no quick relief.

Morocco offers a useful counterpoint. The property asset price index published jointly by Bank Al-Maghrib and the National Agency for Land Registry, Cadastre and Cartography (Agence nationale de la conservation foncière, du cadastre et de la cartographie, ANCFCC) fell 0.4 percent year on year in the first quarter of 2026, and 2.4 percent over the quarter. In Rabat the drop reaches 4.7 percent. But the lull arrives alongside a collapse in the number of transactions, down 9.3 percent over one year. Prices are not falling because the market is opening up. They are falling because the market is seizing up.

Why do women start with an added handicap ?

Because property in the region is passed down more often than it is bought, and inheritance does not work in their favour. The available data on Tunisia, relayed in particular by UN-Habitat in 2022, indicate that 12 percent of women own a home and 14 percent own land, while only 5 percent hold land registered in their own name. A study by the Centre for Research, Studies, Documentation and Information on Women (Centre de recherches, d'études, de documentation et d'information sur la femme, CREDIF) on economic empowerment adds a second image : women make up around 76 percent of the agricultural workforce, while 4 percent of them hold a land title.

These figures date from 2022 and 2023, and the reservation has to travel with them. The 2022 ownership data are the oldest in this article, and no more recent update could be found. They still describe a mechanism with no obvious reason to have vanished. Inheritance remains the main channel of access to land, and in rural areas women frequently hand their share to their brothers to keep the property in undivided family ownership.

The second lock is banking. In Morocco, the rate of women holding bank accounts remains below 30 percent, with a gap of more than 25 points compared with men, a documented drag on female entrepreneurship and on access to long term credit alike. No account, no track record, no collateral to mortgage, and there is

Credit : three central banks, three realities

no mortgage application to build. The World Bank, in its Women, Business and the Law framework, gives Morocco a score of 60.95 points on the legal framework for women's economic rights, against a global average of 67 and a Middle East and North Africa regional average of 43.24. Morocco sits nearly eighteen points ahead of its region and still below the world average. Both sentences are true at once.

One signal points the other way, and it is worth recording. In Morocco, the direct housing aid programme counted more than 105,000 beneficiaries as of 2 June 2026, of whom 52 percent were under forty. The share of women among beneficiaries is given as between 40 percent and 47 percent, because two equally credible progress reports published in May and June 2026 diverge on the point, and the range is reported here rather than an arbitrary choice between them. Where a public scheme bypasses family collateral, women move in.

The cost of money is not the same from one Maghreb country to the next, and that single fact reorders everything. The Central Bank of Tunisia (Banque centrale de Tunisie, BCT) lowered its policy rate to 7 percent with effect from 7 January 2026, then held it unchanged at its board meeting of 3 June 2026. Mortgage rates offered to Tunisian households consequently hover around 8 percent, a figure that comes from specialist sites rather than from a central bank publication and should be treated as an order of magnitude. Bank Al-Maghrib, for its part, held its policy rate at 2.25 percent on 23 June 2026, its fifth consecutive decision to stand still.

Seven against two and a quarter. Stretched over a twenty five year loan, that gap is no nuance in the monthly payment. It changes what the project is. In Tunis the borrower is largely repaying interest. In Casablanca the borrower is repaying capital first.

Algeria took a third route, budgetary rather than monetary. Under the AADL 3 rent to own programme, the state covers the interest subsidy in full, at 100 percent, for loans granted by public banks, and CNEP-Banque offers financing for the personal contribution at a subsidised rate of 1 percent. The loan stops being a market product and becomes a transfer. That settles the question of the cost of credit and displaces it onto two others : the waiting list, and the public finances.

What are the current public responses worth ?

They exist, they are recent, and their scale is wildly uneven. In Tunisia, the National Property Company (Société nationale immobilière, SNIT) set out in May 2026 the conditions attached to the Housing Promotion Fund for Salaried Employees (Fonds de promotion du logement pour les salariés, FOPROLOS). The first category targets incomes between one and two and a half times the minimum wage, or roughly 591 to 1,477 dinars. The personal contribution required is 10 percent, with coverage that can reach the equivalent of fifteen times the minimum wage for the first category, a three year grace period and repayment spread over a maximum of twenty five years. The 2026 to 2030 development plan schedules around 5,000 homes for 750 million dinars, and work on 162 social housing units was launched at Mornaguia, in the governorate of La Manouba, on 3 June 2026.

One hundred and sixty two homes. That number, on its own, measures the distance between the instrument and the need.

In Algeria, the 2026 draft budget provides for the launch of 300,000 AADL 3 homes over the year, and work had actually begun on 146,640 units by May 2026, or 73 percent of the first tranche of 200,000. The orders of magnitude do not compare. What stays open is delivery times, and whether a full interest subsidy is sustainable for the budget.

What the rest of the world says about the same equation

The crisis is neither Maghrebi nor European. It is structural, and two immediate neighbours show it plainly. In Turkey, the central bank's rent index showed an annual rise of 36.2 percent for new tenants in Istanbul in April 2026, while the housing price index rose 26.2 percent year on year in the same city. Renting there has stopped being a step towards ownership. It has become a mechanism of rapid impoverishment.

In Egypt, Parliament voted in April 2026 to phase out rents that had been frozen for more than eight decades, with a scheduled increase of 15 percent a year until they converge with the market. Long standing tenants in Cairo were paying the equivalent of a few dozen euro cents a month. The reform corrects a genuine distortion and dumps the shock on households that had never expected to pay a market rent. Neither situation is enviable, and both teach the same lesson : freeze prices or free them, either way there are losers, and only their identity changes.

When the equation spills beyond housing

Postponing home ownership does not stay inside a household balance sheet. It redraws the shape of lives. In Tunisia, INS data relayed in May 2026 indicate that around 80 percent of people aged 15 to 34 are not married, and that in the 30 to 34 age bracket, 65 percent of men and 28.3 percent of women are single. The average age at first marriage now sits at around 35 for men and 29 for women, a shift of more than eight years over six decades.

The causal chain is debated and should not be flattened. Staying single longer also reflects deliberate choices, longer study and new aspirations, particularly among women. But the analyses converge on one point : the cost of housing, rented or bought, ranks among the most frequently cited material obstacles. Demography follows, with Tunisia now facing a falling birth rate and an ageing population pyramid.

The Sultane view

This equation has no elegant individual solution. No personal trade off, no discipline of saving closes a gap of this nature between a wage floor at 554 dinars and a home at 350,000. The levers that matter sit elsewhere : the policy rate, the volume built, the public guarantee that stands in for the family guarantor, and the inheritance law that decides who owns what long before credit enters the conversation.

That last lever is where the female share of the problem is settled. A woman who inherits no property does not simply hold less wealth. She has less collateral to present, therefore less credit, therefore less wealth. The loop closes on itself, and it closes again one generation later. As long as public debate treats housing as a market and inheritance as a private matter, the two problems will go on feeding each other in silence.

Houda Chouk