Renting on Lebanon’s black market
With rent prices sky high, Syrian tenants are paying the price
Sitting in the gloom of the single room that is now her family’s home, shadows from the small candle placed between us — the room’s only light — played against the wall as Asmar spoke of her flight from Syria.
Asmar, who preferred not to give her surname, is just one of the estimated one million Syrian refugees now renting accommodation in Lebanon. Two years since she arrived in Beirut’s Shatila Palestinian refugee camp, a small bundle of clothes all that she brought from the rubble of her home, Asmar still lives in the room she first rented. With a lack of affordable rental properties, rental prices and eviction rates have soared, while unregistered tenancies, deliberately left without formal contracts to avoid taxation and legal regulation, appear to be the new norm. Since 2011, the influx of Syrians has brought new challenges to Lebanon’s rental market.
In an unlit, unheated room, sharing a bathroom and a rubbish strewn courtyard with four other families, for Asmar, the difficulties of this new market are all too clear. Her husband has been missing in Syria for over a year after returning for his father’s funeral. Without his $300 income to pay the $250 rent, were it not for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) considering her a vulnerable case, she and her two young daughters would be alone on the streets of Beirut: a victim of forced eviction.
It is the tragedy of her situation, rather than the abuse of a landlord, that threatened to force Asmar from her home. However, as a tenant in Lebanon’s rental black market, she is trapped in a regulatory vacuum that poses worrying consequences not just for Syria’s vulnerable citizens but also for Lebanon.
OUT ON THE STREET
When Asmar first arrived in Shatila, her husband never thought to ask for a written lease agreement. With no papers and no proof of her right to live there, when her landlord threatened to force her onto the street, there was little she could do. It is a situation worryingly common among Syrians in Lebanon. A December 2014 report on evictions by the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) and Save the Children found that in three of the four areas assessed in Beirut and Mount Lebanon, less than 10 percent of households possessed a written lease. Where families had been evicted — and 6.6 percent have been since arriving in Lebanon — 98 percent did not have a formal rental agreement.