CAIRO - “Yes I broke the law and took some three metres from the street in order to build another room to add to my 23 square metre flat that accommodates me, my wife and children,” Ibrahim, a father of five, admitted. He was explaining why he, together with many of his neighbours in el-Zawya el-Hamra governmental housing blocks, violated the building and property law. Sobhi, like most of his neighbours, was moved to these buildings in this working-class area in Cairo as a temporary alternative to the homes that they lost, which were demolished late in the 1970s. They were all totally forgotten then and subsequently by successive governments, the last of which even abandoned building houses for the poor and middle-class people completely and adopted, instead, the “Build your own home' that seemed unaffordable to the majority of Egyptians. The el-Zawya housing problems are also true for many other housing areas built by the State for poor citizens to live in since the 1952 revolution, whose principles included ensuring social justice. However this principle, when it came to the housing sector, was not translated into practice, with poor quality and ugly blocks built in the suburbs or isolated estates. Suffering from poor services and a lack of maintenance, most of them have turned into impoverished shanty towns. “We decided to appropriate part of the 15-metre width of the street to add it to our flats, which do not exceed 40 square metres in area,” said Mahmoud Ibrahim, who lives in the New Zawyah area of old Cairo. Ibrahim, who works in a shop selling electric apparatus wonders why the Government built flats with an area of no more than 40 square metres, while leaving the streets 15 metres wide. “We agreed with other neighbours of the same block to share the cost of the foundations of the additional room. Then each household would bear the cost of the room on this extension,” Ibrahim told the Arabic-language magazine Radio and TV. The suburbs' authorities closed their eyes to such clear violations of the law, apparently because they knew of the governmental inability to create alternatives for these people to live in, say experts. Meanwhile, the State authorities have been so generous in recent decades in offering business tycoons millions of square metres of land at trivial prices to create their luxurious housing projects or to put on hold for some years, before selling the land to make a fortune. Accordingly, the authorities could not punish the poor for their violation of the building laws, when it came to seizing a few metres of land from the street so as to create a room for their children to sleep in, add experts. When ousted president Hosni Mubarak included the creation of thousands of housing units for young people within his election programme in 2005, the then Ministry of Housing adopted a project for establishing some units in the new cities such as the Sixth of October outside Cairo. They set stringent conditions on the young potential owners, such as an age limit and having a marriage contract as proof of their need for a home to have a family. The latter condition, in particular, represented a major obstacle as most Egyptian families refuse to let their daughters become married to a young man, who does not already have a flat Sayed Abdel Aal, a local man, recounts: “I suffered living with my in-laws for three years until getting a contract for a flat in the Mubarak's Housing Project for Youth in Sixth October. To my astonishment, the total cost of the flat exceeded that of flats being sold by the private sector.” The young people applying to this project say they had to get loans from the Bank of Housing and Reconstruction and make the repayment instalments at high interest rates, which made the price of the flat unaffordable to most young people.
