MANUFACTURED PRECARITY: HOW A BIASED LEGAL SYSTEM, ECONOMIC CRISIS, AND ENTRENCHED POWER STRUCTURES PRODUCE HOUSING INSECURITY IN BEIRUT

Abstract

Lebanon’s capital city of Beirut has for more than 30 years been subject to speculative investments in land, where housing’s value has been severely tipped to acting as an asset, rather than a stable unit of dwelling for the city’s inhabitants. As such, the available stock of affordable housing units for the city’s most poor and vulnerable classes has continuously shrunk. The remainder of this housing is further contested because of the influx of more than a million Syrian refugees fleeing the country’s civil war since 2011 – Syrian refugees/migrants composed anywhere from 15-20% of the population of Lebanon in 2022. Still other migrants came to the country to do contract work and seek affordable housing units in the city they work in.

This tight housing market was squeezed even further by the economic and political crisis that began in Lebanon in 2019 and has devalued the local currency by more than 95% as of the end of 2022, and the explosion of ammonium nitrate in the Port of Beirut in August of 2020 – which damaged more than 70,000 housing units.

Analyzing five residential multi-story apartment buildings in the Geitawi neighborhood of Beirut that house vulnerable populations, this thesis proposes that the conditions that the tenants live in, which are generally poor and defined by uncertainty about their ability to remain in place (precarity), have been manufactured. Several factors have manufactured these precarious conditions: first, the city’s housing market and its legal framework, which have empowered landlords to solely dictate their tenants’ conditions; second, the lack of protections or recourse available for tenants, which the economic crisis has exacerbated to the point where tenants have little options to challenge their precarity and the landlord who are a primary cause of it.

The extreme asymmetry in power that has developed between landlord and tenant in these five buildings confirms previous scholarly work on precarity: that modern cities produce precarity by design. It also suggests that power hierarchies of property that produce precarity can become even more entrenched in the absence of a framework of state-sanctioned rights. This thesis also adds to recent scholarship analyzing the power relationships that form between landlords and tenants that have also found that asymmetries lead to poor outcomes for tenants and are difficult to address through market-based regulations and widespread legal frameworks.