Three killed in ‘old rent’ property collapse after Alexandria landlord ignores renovation order for decades

Three members of the same family were killed on Sunday by the partial collapse of the roof of their house, which also severely injured another family member, leaving the rest of the family and the community in the Alexandria neighborhood in shock at the tragedy. A relative of the family, which has rented the house for generations under the ‘old rent’ system, holds the building landlord responsible because they ignored an official order to renovate the property for nearly two decades. While ignoring renovation orders is a finable offence, there are scores of cases in which landlords do it anyway, Karim Ezzat, a lawyer specializing in old rent litigation told Mada Masr.  The decades old previous system — a tissue of different laws that capped rental rates in specific properties, allowed tenants to inherit rental contracts and prohibited the contracts’ termination —has increasingly sparked conflict over recent years between tenants and resentful landlords who feel they are missing out on profits available on the uncontrolled real estate market that has taken off since the 1990s. Since the introduction of a new law last year stipulating a gradual dissolution of the old rent system, tensions between landlords and tenants have only heightened. Ahmed Abdel Maqsoud is the brother of one of the victims who was killed in Sunday’s building collapse.  “Someone from the street called me and said, ‘Ahmed, come quick, there are crashing sounds in your house and dust coming out,’” Abdel Maqsoud told Mada Masr. The two-floor old rent house, in the Ghorbal area of Moharam Bek neighborhood in central Alexandria, was rented for decades by his parents and served as their family home, later becoming the home of his brother Mohamed, an administrative employee at the University of Alexandria Faculty of Arts. He lived there with his wife, Samah, and their four children.  “I went to see what happened and someone from a higher building realised that the roof had collapsed,” Abdel Maqsoud said. The civil defense authority arrived shortly and began to remove the rubble, Abdel Maqsoud explained. They discovered that the partial collapse had hit the bedroom of Mohamed and his wife, killing them and their four-year-old daughter Farida, as well as severely injuring their second youngest, Adam, who was in intensive care until Monday night. Mohamed’s two eldest boys, aged 15 and 12, were outside the house when the incident happened.  The tragedy of their death has struck the neighborhood. Mohamed was a beloved and well-respected man in the area, two of his neighbors told Mada Masr. Alexandria governor Ayman Attia ordered the surviving family members be paid compensation, while the University of Alexandria’s Faculty of Arts released an obituary for Mohamed. But Abdel Maqsoud said that no compensation is enough. He believes the danger could have been avoided, and blamed the house’s collapse on the landlord intentionally neglecting to repair structural damage that occurred over two decades ago. Back in 2004 or 2005, he explained, an old house next to the family home was demolished to be replaced with a taller apartment building. During the demolition process, “there was some kind of pulling or dragging process affecting the building” that caused cracks in the structure. Abdel Maqsoud said that then-Alexandria governor Abdel Salam al-Mahgoub offered personally to help fix any damage to the family home, but the landlord insisted that the family inform neighborhood authorities to obtain a renovation order.  Even when they acquired an order around 2006-2007, the landlord ignored it for the next two decades.  In the rent laws, demolitions or renovation orders are issued by neighborhood authorities under the governorate, either after the residents make a request or if the authorities notice damages during routine check ups, lawyer Karim Ezzat explained to Mada Masr. Implementing the orders is the responsibility of the owner. The orders are mandatory, and if they are not acted upon, tenants can file police reports to cite negligence and landlords can face fines escalating to criminal charges if the negligence leads to a fatal building collapse. So why didn’t the landlord face any consequences all these years? Ezzat explained how neighborhood authorities often do little to enforce renovation or demolition orders for decaying buildings. Neighborhood authorities in many cases issue unannounced renovation orders, for partial renovation or demolition, sometimes never informing the residents or the owners of the orders’ existence, the lawyer explained. They do not follow through with enforcement, but bring up the orders upon investigation when a collapse happens to say, ‘we issued an order, but the owner ignored to implement it,’ thereby placing blame squarely upon the owners. This is particularly prevalent in Alexandria, where there are many neighborhoods with many houses on the brink of collapse, particularly in neighborhoods standing above a lot of underground water. Abdel Maqsoud said during the years in which the landlord ignored the order, the owner would repeatedly point to the low value of rent paid by the family as the reason he could not afford the renovation.  As per the rent freezes imposed by the old rent law, the family’s rent used to be fixed at LE3 per month, before the new law raised the minimum to LE250. Ezzat pointed to various reasons old rent landlords ignore renovation orders: sometimes landlords really cannot afford the expense, or the current owners are heirs of the property but have no relationship to the building. Some landlords also intentionally let the houses decay in hopes that when it eventually collapses, they can replace it with more profitable real estate opportunities, he said. Abdel Maqsoud said that the family had offered multiple times to help fund the renovation out of their own pocket. It’s for this reason that he believes the landlord intentionally left the house to deteriorate.  He pointed to another incident in 2011, when real estate contractors proposed that the house be demolished to build a new apartment building; an idea the family supported but that was rejected by the landlord due to a dispute with the contractors over his percentage ownership of the house. Abdel Maqsoud said he mentioned the negligence when he gave a statement to the Public Prosecution, which is investigating the incident, but noted that the landlord has been unreachable so far. He added that he does not have plans for legal action, since he expects nothing to come of it and since it will not change what happened to his brother’s family. Landlord negligence verging on intentional sabotage has become a common feature in the last few decades of the ‘old rent’ system. Frozen since the 1960s, the rent control system has turned into a silent war as many landlords seek to push tenants out or force an end to the rent-control, with some telling Mada Masr previously they feel robbed of the potential to profit from their properties. The introduction of the new old rent law last year imposed an immediate set of raises for old rent properties and promised the complete liberalization of rental relationships within 5 to 7 years, allowing landlords to evict their tenants in that timeframe.  Tenants, many of whom have lived in the rent-controlled homes for generations and have no alternative, say the law fails to reflect the value that many of them invested in the properties to maintain them or to compensate them for khlew regl advances they paid to acquire the houses — sums which were equivalent to property purchase prices at the time of payment. Tenants and tenant representatives previously told Mada Masr that the changes anticipated under the new law have only increased the tensions.The post Three killed in ‘old rent’ property collapse after Alexandria landlord ignores renovation order for decades first appeared on Mada Masr.