Thirty days to move...to where?

There are reports that Dubai Municipality has started the clock ticking on its one-month deadline for landlords of shared villas to evict the tenants, or, presumably, evict all but one family. It's part of DM's ‘One Villa-One Family’ campaign.

It seems to me that it's another knee-jerk reaction. Another simplistic blanket ruling to a highly complex problem.

First of all, there's a obvious safety implication of overcrowding.

Rooms divided by flimsy partitions, tens, even hundreds, of people crammed into inadequate space, means of escape compromised. And the sanitary and health problems of so many people living in such close proximity sharing limited bathroom and cooking facilities.

Obviously action must be taken to remove this problem.

But not all shared villas are overcrowded. Some are comfortably shared by singles or families, each having sufficient space and facilities and living in harmony.

There is a big difference between sharing and overcrowding.

You also have to factor in the accommodation that people are prepared to live in - I talked about a couple of examples back in January, here.

Then there's the economic factor. People have to share accommodation because they simply can't afford anything on their own. That takes us into the whole business area of salaries. Not only whether companies are prepared to but whether they can afford to increase salaries in line with accommodation and general inflation increases.

Do we need regulations on the number of people moving into Dubai until adequate accommodation is available? Not to mention the rest of the infrastructure, including hospitals, police, fire brigade, ambulances, roads & transport, power, sewage treatment, water...

About 800 people a day are moving here. Even deducting those who leave it's still a huge, relentless population increase that seems to be unsustainable.

Then the much-discussed question of the whole real estate sector being focussed on high end, luxury, expensive developments with little or no affordable accommodation being built.

That needs government involvement because land and construction prices are going through the roof and developers naturally want to maximise their return on investment.

And the big human question - how on earth are all the evicted people going to find alternative accommodation in one month? Where are they going to live if they can't find anything?

Most of the comments seem to be that they're desperately looking in the northern emirates. But there's a shortage of accommodation there too, and the additional people trying to move in will inevitably push rents up.

And if many of them do find accommodation there, it will add to the chaos on the roads into Dubai in the mornings and out in the evenings.

It's a vicious circle isn't it.

And last but not least, what about the year-in-advance rent that tenants have paid? Is there a guarantee that they will be repaid, or have their post-dated cheques returned?

Major cities around the world are struggling to find an answer to the problem of accommodation being beyond the reach of essential but lower paid workers, who are moving to cheaper areas. That includes essential workers such as cleaners, bus drivers, even nurses, firefighters and so on.

As with so many other areas, Dubai could and should have learnt the lessons of other cities around the world and planned to avoid the problems. It could have been done, we had the ideal opportunity because Dubai is being built from scratch, from empty desert.



Khaleej Times is running the announcement today, here.