Over the past decade, longtime residents of Cairo have started getting lost in their own city. Taxi drivers and Google Maps can’t keep up with Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s urban renewal campaign, which has empowered the military to raze historic neighborhoods and throw up new roads at a breakneck pace. A city of 23 million where 40% live in informal settlements, Cairo is at the center of el-Sisi’s push for a “slum-free” Egypt by 2030. Replacing slums with skyscrapers and highways hasn’t made it any easier for working-class Cairenes to afford legal homes — but it has made the city center more tourist-friendly while banishing much of its green space to the city’s wealthy outskirts.

Paradoxically, Cairo has both a housing surplus and a housing crisis. From 2006 to 2017, Egypt led the world in homebuilding per capita, and el-Sisi’s urban renewal policies have kept the construction boom going. Today Egypt has more than 12 million vacant homes, many of which are located in expensive new towns on Cairo’s fringes or in the desert. At the same time, the country has an affordable housing shortage of around 3 million, a gap that forces Cairenes into slums and leaves them with few options when the military arrives to demolish their improvised dwellings. The mismatch between luxury development and low-income demand is only becoming more glaring: since 2016, Egypt’s average home price to income ratio has more than doubled. Rather than easing this pressure, Egypt recently dismantled a set of traditional tenant protections called “old rent” amid broad welfare cutbacks imposed by the International Monetary Fund. Under the century-old system, some 1.6 million families pay as little as $1 in monthly rent; once their units revert to market rates, they may be at risk of joining the more than 2.8 million people who have already been evicted to make way for el-Sisi’s megaprojects.

In theory, such a building spree should eventually have lowered prices as new homes “filtered down” to less affluent buyers. But in practice, Egypt’s real estate market has split into sealed-off segments that prevent any real filtering. Most new construction targets upper- and middle-income Egyptians, who buy homes as speculative assets rather than as places to live. With no vacancy taxes or property levies, developers and investors can sit on empty units indefinitely. Working-class Cairenes are locked out of the mortgage system entirely, since most earn irregular incomes that make them ineligible for credit. Even the few subsidized housing programs that exist tend to favor salaried professionals and members of the security services.