The 1995/1996 Household Income, Expenditure - (PDF, 101 mb ...

infrastructure or planning permission. Slums have burgeoned from outright
invasion of public and private land. The table below shows that informal
communities presently accommodate about 40% of Egypt's urban population
(some 1.9 million housing units - about 60% of the country's population lives
in "urban" areas). That figure is likely to grow to 60% by the year 2000
(Essam el Din (1994), p. 20).
Distribution of Informal Communities in Ten Governorates
Governorate Number of Population % of Urban
Areas Population Living
in Informal
Communities in
Urban Areas
Cairo 79 2,437,988 35.9
Giza 32 1,398,000 62.0
Kalyoubeya 60 686,350 46.0
Alexandria 40 1,162,750 34.0
Fayoum 28 99,853 23.5
Beni Suef 46 144,770 31.0
Menia 30 273,000 49.0
Assiut 49 401,000 25.0
Sohag 34 381,181 56.4
Qena 8 22,700 31.4
VI.9
TOTAL 406 17,665,475 39.7
Source: Shura Council Report on Informal Communities
Din, op. cit., p. 22.
March 1994 in Essam
el
Since passage of the 1981 law, the government of Egypt has based its
low-income housing subsidy policy on a supply side objective: establish and
develop new communities to ease the population pressures and infrastructure
problems of greater Cairo and the Nile Delta. Funds for building materials,
basic provision of water and sewerage systems, power generation,
transportation, market access and infrastructure management have failed to
meet plan expectations. It will take some time before these services have been
established in the harsh desert locations to make the new communities viable.
There are a limited number of ways, with or without state intervention,
to bring housing prices closer to reality. to deflate the huge unrealized
demand values (natural as well as speculative) caused by housing policies. If
funding for such purposes was unlimited, the state could make long-term
tenants legal owners of their properties, and compensate landlords for an
assessed market rental value. More than likely, landlords would then tear
down their buildings, build expensive new ones, and exacerbate the problem.
At about the same cost, because a large proportion of low-rent tenants are