Thirty-year-old Egyptian Omar Tariq postpones the decision to get engaged until he can obtain an apartment, even by rent, in light of his economic circumstances that do not allow him to own one. However, even the monthly rent is not easy in light of the high rents that are not commensurate with wages.
Tareq, who currently lives with his parents and siblings in the Maadi neighborhood (south of Cairo), works as an employee in a private company, and his monthly salary does not exceed the minimum wage, which amounts to 8,000 pounds (about 157 dollars), while the rent for “the lowest apartment is 3,000 pounds, in average areas such as Hadayek El Maadi, Tora, or Helwan,” indicating that he does not dare to look for apartments in the Maadi neighborhood in which he grew up; Rents double in this distinctive area.
The housing crisis in Egypt does not revolve around a lack of supply in general. On the contrary, “there is abundance compared to the size of demand,” according to Alaa Fekry, a member of the “Real Estate Investment Division” in the “Cairo Chamber of Commerce,” explaining to Asharq Al-Awsat that the crisis “sums up in the concentration of this abundance in the quality of units directed to the upper classes, while the middle class and below suffer from finding units that match their financial capabilities.”
Fikri pointed out that “with the rise in housing unit prices, middle and lower class people tended to rent, and the increase in demand led to prices rising in a way that was disproportionate to incomes.” More than 212,000 housing units were launched, whether by real estate developers or the state, during 2024/2025, with investments amounting to 245.3 billion pounds, according to the Statistics Center.
Observers link the rise in rental prices to the increased demand for them by expatriates of different nationalities, which has led to jumps in prices in some areas, but what is striking is that despite the decline in the number of expatriates stationed in the “Faisal area,” for example, rental prices are still high.
Aside from expatriates, urban researcher and director of the Urban Observatory, Yahya Shawkat, believes that the housing crisis is essentially a crisis in purchasing power. Due to the rise in real estate prices relative to income levels, especially for the poor and middle-income people, over decades.
The founder of the “Umran Observatory” adds, “The majority of Egyptians who own a home own it through self-construction and not purchase, whether by building in the countryside or new cities. Construction takes place over years according to the ability and savings of the owners.” However, ownership through purchasing from the market is relatively limited, and did not exceed a third according to the 2017 census, and this is the result of weak purchasing power.” Another aspect of the housing crisis in Egypt lies in “a large sector of Egyptians resorting to working abroad and transferring their savings to buy a property, which created two real estate markets and an unfair competition between two purchasing powers,” according to Shawkat.
The massive Houthi attack on the fronts of the western coast of Yemen does not appear to be just a new attempt to test the lines of contact, in light of the expansion of the scope of operations between south of Hodeidah and southwest of Taiz, and the group’s simultaneous use of ground attacks, ballistic missiles, drones, and booby-trapped boats.
After years of relative calm that followed the 2022 truce, the Iran-backed Houthis chose a geographically and militarily highly sensitive area to launch one of their most violent attacks since then, targeting government forces’ positions in Al-Barh, Al-Kadha, Maqbanah, Al-Ahtoub, and Jabal Ghubari, in conjunction with the bombing of Al-Mokha, Al-Khawkhah, Al-Waziyah, and other areas on the West Coast.
The nature of the movement and the distribution of attacks indicate that the group wants to achieve more than one field goal at the same time. At the forefront is the pressure on the city of Taiz from the west, cutting off or threatening the road linking it to the port of Mokha, and pushing government forces to distribute their capabilities on a wide front extending from the Taiz countryside to southern Hodeidah, while keeping the sea lanes under threat.
On Friday, sources from both sides told Agence France-Presse that more than 80 people had been killed in the clashes since Thursday, while no unified official toll was issued by the Yemeni government or the Houthis.
The focus comes on southwest Taiz, in an area that represents a link between the city and the coast. Therefore, controlling advanced positions in Al-Kadha, Al-Barah, and Maqbanah does not mean, in the military calculation, the acquisition of additional lands only, but also getting close to one of the most important lines of movement and supply between Taiz and Al-Mokha.
The importance of the attack does not stop at the Taiz and Mokha borders. The confrontations extended to the south of Hodeidah, especially in the direction of Hays and Al-Khokha, which geographically opens directly to the western coast and is close to the shipping lines in the southern Red Sea. This deployment gives the Houthis an opportunity to pressure government forces from a wider area, and also allows the group to keep the sea threat part of the land battle.
On the political level, the movements of the Yemeni leadership reflected an appreciation that the Houthi escalation goes beyond being a limited attack on advanced sites, as the head of the Yemeni Presidential Command Council, Rashad Al-Alimi, made contact with a number of military commanders to find out the developments in the situation on the Taiz and Hodeidah fronts, and the level of readiness to confront the attack.
