Cairo’s flirtation with the skyscraper
When I’m done walking in Ma’adi and need to find my way back to my aunt & uncle’s apartment, I look to the skyline. A group of nine or ten enormous buildings tower above the rest, and I move toward them. Their brown layers, tight balconies, and the open space between them remind me of the architecture of low income housing in the States, especially of Chicago’s Cabrini-Green.
Constructed in the 1980s, Abrag Othman (Othman Towers) might house about 10,000 middle- and upper-middle-class folk, according to one resident. The pharmacist who works in a shop below the towers informs me that each tower is only 40-60% occupied: “That’s why it’s so quiet here.” Many of the apartments in the towers, as in many Cairene buildings, are purchased as investments but remain unoccupied. New apartments in Cairo are sold “unfinished”; it is the responsibility of the new owner to put in flooring, appliances, finish walls, install moldings, lighting fixtures, toilets, sinks, etc.
In the towers closest to the Nile, an unfinished flat sells for about 2,000,000 Egyptian pounds (at the current exchange, about $370,000), in the towers in the middle, about LE 1,000,000 ($185,000), and in the towers furthest from the river, about LE 500,000 (about $92,000). At these prices, they are luxury homes, far out of the financial reach of most Egyptians, especially now that an economic crisis has raised the price of bread about fivefold in the last two years.
