For decades, hundreds of thousands of Egyptian families have lived in apartments for as little as less than a dollar a month, including in some of Cairo’s most expensive neighborhoods. Even as inflation surged and the currency’s value plummeted, they passed down their rental contracts from generation to generation.
But that security came at the expense of landlords who saw valuable properties going for next to nothing and the housing problems officials say it created. Now Egypt’s government is jettisoning the system known as “old rent,” ending tenant protections that have been in place in some form since 1920.
Under a new law ratified this week by President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, rents on protected apartments will rise significantly over the next seven years until they are raised to market rates.
Officials say the legislation will rebalance a housing market long distorted by rigid rent controls, which led to property neglect, a surfeit of vacant units and abuse by some tenants who sublet dirt-cheap apartments at market rates. But tenants and their advocates say it will also leave about 1.6 million households at risk of homelessness at a time when Egyptians have already been battered by repeated economic crises.
Poverty has claimed more and more Egyptian families, with at least a third now under the official poverty line. Inflation has remained in the double digits for more than three years straight.
All the while, Egypt’s social safety net, which has underpinned the social contract for decades, has grown increasingly threadbare. Subsidies for bread, electricity and gas are gone or going. Free public education and health care have deteriorated.
Now rent controls, too, are vanishing.
“We expected that this would be our home permanently, but with this new law, we don’t know what we can do,” said Suzan Abdel Ghani, 37, a freelance journalist from the Upper Egyptian city of Luxor whose father has paid 40 Egyptian pounds a month — currently equal to about 82 cents — since renting the family apartment in 1984.
Ms. Abdel Ghani now lives in Cairo, but was born and raised in the Luxor apartment. Her mother died there. The memories it carries are irreplaceable, she said, even if her father could afford a new apartment.
“My father is retired now,” she said. “How can we move to another apartment that could cost his entire pension?”
About a quarter of the households paying old rent are in Cairo. Under the overhaul, tenants’ rents will first increase between tenfold and twentyfold, depending on the desirability of the neighborhood, then rise an additional 15 percent annually for seven years, before shooting up to market rate.
Officials say evicted tenants will receive subsidized apartments or other alternative housing.
“We are aware that some tenants face difficult economic conditions,” Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly said last month, promising that old-rent tenants would not be “adversely affected.”
But government-built affordable housing is already short of the need. Many families who have been forced to leave their homes for such housing because of government redevelopment sprees have found their communities broken up and dispersed to faraway units that can be more expensive than advertised.
For tenants, losing old rent “affects their whole life plans,” said Karim Ezzat, a legal researcher who has tracked the issue. “The old-rent law gave renters security and the stability of having permanent homes, while now, they have to leave their units in seven years,” when rents will rise to levels experts say most tenants will not be able to pay.
Mr. Ezzat and other tenant advocates said that the system was also unfair to owners but that the government should have prioritized ensuring tenants would not become homeless before rushing to pass the law.
The current system creates multiple problems. Because people can inherit leases from relatives, giving some tenants access to multiple apartments, some units end up vacant or sublet at market rates.
Property owners have long called it untenable for tenants to pay so little that the rent frequently falls short of maintenance costs, to say nothing of the profits landlords could be making if rents followed the market.
Faced with an unbridgeable gap between costs and revenues, many Egyptian landlords have let old-rent properties fall into disrepair. Stories abound of tenants who rent for a pittance amassing expensive real estate elsewhere. And some owners deliberately damage their buildings, hoping they will collapse so they can reclaim the land underneath.
But many renters have invested their own money in fixing up their buildings, a factor they argue should have been considered in the new legislation.
Ms. Abdel Ghani, whose family apartment is in Luxor, said her mother had saved up so her family could repair their dilapidated building bit by bit over the years.
By now, market-rate rents in their neighborhood have risen to around 6,000 Egyptian pounds a month, or about $123.60, far beyond her 70-year-old father’s means.
“I won’t allow my father, who has reached a very old age, to be insulted, or to live very far away in the desert with no services or life,” she said.
Vivian Yee is a Times reporter covering North Africa and the broader Middle East. She is based in Cairo.
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