Cairo: When the founders of Izbit Khayrallah arrived in their new neighbourhood it was mostly sand, snakes and scorpions.
The migrants from Upper Egypt and the Nile Delta had much sought-after jobs in the military-run factories in the industrial city of Helwan but nowhere to live. It was just after the 1973 Arab-Israeli war and Cairo’s housing shortage had already reached crisis point.
In desperation they claimed a piece of state-owned land and built their town from scratch, starting with simple, one-storey structures and lining up every day to get water from a single pipe nearby.
One of dozens of informal communities that make up the bulk of Cairo’s sprawling metropolis, Izbit Khayrallah is now home to 750,000 families whose homes are under constant threat of demolition by the state.
Today the lane ways between the buildings – now three- or four-storeys tall – are narrow and dark, the only splash of colour is the washing hanging from lines strung between windows.
The town’s main commercial thoroughfare is a rough, dusty, unpaved road lined with small stores and workshops that is in part covered by a deep, wide pool of water. There is no hospital, no ambulance or fire station and no post office. Residents pooled their money to install water pipes and fought hard for the sub-standard sewage network the state eventually installed.
The one school, also built with money raised by the community, runs a double-shift to cope with demand and still there is the need for many, many more.
Lawyer Mohamed Abdel Halim – a resident of Izbit Khayrallah since 2002 – is leading the fight against the Governorate of Cairo, which has waged a four-decade long battle against the town, accusing the residents of building their homes without a permit on state-owned land.
“We have fought many cases for those whose houses are threatened with demolition . . . this is a proper community, people have been living here for the past 30 years, they have invested their own money to provide services and they should be able to own this land, it should be rezoned,” he says. “There is nowhere else for people to live.”
In 1995, the state came with bulldozers to demolish the area. Residents stood in front of the machines and slept in the dirt to save their homes, he says. Eventually they won their case in court – the government was ordered to enter into a contract with the people of Izbit Khayrallah and provide services and amenities like water and electricity.
“The contract was never honoured, even though the people had received their verdict from the High Administrative Court of Egypt,” he says.
Ten years later the authorities finally built a sewage system, but they invested so little in it that it just created more health problems: “The water and sewage mixed together and caused a lot of disease.”
Like Egypt’s former leader Hosni Mubarak, the country’s favoured presidential candidate and retired army general Abdel Fattah al-Sisi also has a housing program – to provide one million housing units to low-income Egyptians by 2020.
But Yahia Shawky, a housing and land rights researcher at the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, says the price of housing in the Sisi project will put it out of reach of the very people he is targeting.
“Forty per cent of the lowest-earning Egyptians will be deprived of them,” he says.
The disintegration of the local government structure following the 2011 revolution and the power of the Ministry of Housing, which is one of the biggest land developers in Egypt, are two of the main impediments to reform, Mr Shawky says.
“The Ministry of Housing is supposed to govern the housing market, yet at the same time it is a major player . . . it is a real conflict of interest.”
Egypt’s property market is weighted to favour speculators and investors, there is a chaotic set of laws governing land ownership and a need to declare an amnesty on informal tenure in areas that provide affordable housing – like Izbit Khayrallah, he says.
“The government is always talking about stability and national security – well, housing rights are a very important part of national security and it is time for the new government to recognize that,” Mr Shawky says.
Housing activist Kareem Ibrahim, who is co-founder of the Takween Integrated Community Development and project leader at Tadamun, the Cairo Urban Solidarity Initiative, says the level of government investment in informal housing areas has been very low compared to other urban communities.
It is the wealthy, low-density developments with very few inhabitants such as those in New Cairo and 6th of October City that attract the bulk of the investment, Mr Ibrahim says.
The government has been selling land to developers and speculators, raising land values through public auctions that have generated income for the government while neglecting existing urban areas, he says.
“These neglected communities have their own economic base in the informal economy, and the informal economy represents a significant part of the Egyptian economy,” Mr Ibrahim says.“This is the network that saved Egypt from the economic crisis of 2008 and the tough times following the 2011 revolution – it is a hidden economic network that sustains the country.”
And yet people in this network have a lack of secure tenure, lack of services, lack of utilities and lack of economic opportunities, he says.
“They pay for their houses, they extend their own water pipes, and they are productive members of society but they are cheap labour and that is why the government needs to keep them in this precarious situation: to control them.”
Two years ago, 35-year-old Abu Mohamed came from the city of Fayoum, about 100 kilometres south of Cairo, to work in an apartment block built illegally on agricultural land near the suburb of Maadi. It was a good job – along with a small salary, Abu Mohamed, his wife and four children were provided with a small room with a kitchen and bathroom, as well as electricity and water. It didn`t last long.
In March the apartment block, along with dozens of nearby buildings, were demolished by the government, putting at least 500 people out of a job and leaving thousands homeless. His family moved back to Fayoum, while he is living in front of the local mosque – also built illegally on agricultural land – and looking for work.
“We didn’t have any warning,” he says. “Those who could moved their furniture to another place, others like me just had their belongings demolished along with the apartments.”
One of the owners of the apartment buildings that were demolished, Said Lotfy Khales, insists he and his brothers inherited the agricultural land from their grandfather.
Yes, it was illegal to build on the land, he admits, but says the Nile no longer reaches their land, rendering it unusable for agricultural purposes.
“We even applied for a permit that would allow us to build a pump so we could get the water to our land, but they denied this to us,” Mr Khales says. “We know it was a mistake to build without a permit but everyone around us was building and we just built like everyone else – all of this was built without a permit,” he says, gesturing to the buildings around him, some of them 30 years old.
Mr Khales says he was told the apartments were demolished after the government sold the land to an international investor who plans to use it to build large residential and business towers.
Fairfax Media was unable to confirm the information and the Cairo Governorate did not return calls.
Egypt’s presidential election runs from May 26 until May 27.
