Rabat: exorbitant rents, dilapidated housing, students in distress

As the start of the school year approaches, students, interns and some employees are struggling to find accommodation or a room to rent in the largest cities, especially in Rabat, due to soaring real estate prices. The “luckiest” who find one are victims of the “greed” of brokers.

In Rabat, exorbitant prices are being asked for “dilapidated” and “uninhabitable” housing by intermediaries operating in an “anarchic” manner and outside the law. This is the observation made by the site Airport 21 during a tour of the Yacoub Al Mansour neighborhood, known for attracting students, interns and some employees due to its proximity to various essential services. “This surge in prices is mainly due to the high demand for housing in the capital’s neighborhoods. (…) Previously, most citizens looking for housing turned to working-class neighborhoods because of their lower prices and proximity to essential services. Unfortunately, even these working-class neighborhoods now have high rents,” Abdelali Errami, president of the National Association for Social and Cultural Development in Rabat, explained to the online media. He justifies “this high demand by the presence in the capital of universities, hospitals and central administrations, which means that the demand for housing far exceeds the supply, thus leading to an anarchic increase in rents.” This civil society actor did not fail to castigate “the abusive exploitation of citizens’ needs and the increase in rents to exorbitant levels without any control.” To reverse the trend, he insists on the importance of “setting a ceiling on rents in order to put an end to the abuses of those who take advantage of the need for housing to make unethical gain”. He suggests that citizens use real estate agencies operating within the legal framework in order to escape the “greed” of brokers and asks these agencies to “help rental applicants instead of increasing the prices of their services”.