JEDDAH: Residents of a south Jeddah housing project are days away from having to leave their homes under orders from the Real Estate Fund.
"We have never received a response from officials, and now when the building is in serious danger they ask us to evacuate," said Mohammed Al-Ghamdi, one of the 48 tenants living in two buildings that are part of a cluster of tenements that make up the Prince Abdul Majeed Iskan Project in south Jeddah.
The order to evacuate the crumbling structures has come after tenants - who own these apartments - have complained to officials for years about the decaying state of their buildings.
The residents said that they unexpectedly received an order on Wednesday warning them to be out of their flats before a scheduled evaluation of the buildings would begin later this week. Engineers will determine if the buildings can undergo renovations that could take up to two years or whether the structures simply need to be razed.
Yesterday, officials were preparing to turn off the electricity and water to the building to ensure the residents evacuate. Al-Ghamdi said that they were offered replacement apartments in an old building that used to be a public school in the 20-building housing project.
The Real Estate Fund gave the tenants SR10,000 to renovate their new apartments, a sum the tenants say doesn't come close to what's needed to turn school space into homes.
"I was even told that if the building was not suitable for renovation and that it had to be demolished, I might not receive financial compensation for that. We would have the new damaged apartments as compensation," said apartment owner Nasser Al-Ghamdi, estimating the cost of renovating his allotted space in the school into an apartment at about SR50,000. He claims that he's spent SR90,000 on his flat in the building.
"There are people in the building who are retired and don't have any source of income except for a simple pension," he said. "How will they live in the new place?"
