JEDDAH, 22 July 2006 — Families in residential neighborhoods across Jeddah are alarmed at the way apartment owners are renting flats to illegal immigrants and single men, especially in suburbs where families mainly reside.
Recent police raids of random properties in neighborhoods across Jeddah revealed the extent to which overstayers and single men are being given accommodation by unscrupulous apartment owners. Some families, especially women members, feel insecure by the way single men are occupying apartment blocks where couples live.
Families complain that single men have a habit of bringing their friends and associates to party and that they end up living dirty.
Abdullah Muhammad, a retired Saudi man, lives in a building that has eight apartments.
“The landlord has rented three apartments in the ground floor to single men of foreign nationalities,” he said.
Each day after Isha prayers till midnight, Muhammad sits at the entrance of the apartment building counting the number of single men entering the building. “I see many people who I believe to be overstayers coming and leaving the building. Most of the people that live here are Bangladeshi,” he said.
According to some residents, landlords are driven by greed and rent apartments to single men charging each individually and thus turning apartment buildings into hotels. In some cases real estate agents rent apartments to single men without the knowledge of landlords who live in a different town or city away from Jeddah.
Mansour Salem lives in the prestigious Al-Rawda district of Jeddah. He says that when he is away from home at work or elsewhere then his family is stranded inside the apartment and unable to leave because his wife is scared of the singles that live in the building. “They gather in front of the entrance and sit there for hours preventing my family from going out alone. My wife just doesn’t trust them. We only go out when I’m there and that’s usually in the evenings after work or during the weekends,” he said.
Salem said he has told the owner to kick the single men out or otherwise he will move somewhere else.
Antar Ali, an Egyptian real estate agent, said that the law prohibits renting apartments to single men in a family building. He said that offices that violate the law would be subject to legal action and could be fined.
“If a factory or a big company wants to rent a place for workers then they cannot squeeze them into apartment buildings designated for families. The factory or the company must rent a complete building for single men. At our office we try hard to separate single men from families because we understand the sensitivity of the issue in Saudi society,” he said.
