A TOWERING PROBLEM:

GAZA CITY'S HOUSING BOOM

by Rose-Marie Barbeau

Gaza City -- The face of this city has changed dramatically since the days of the intifada, when its main features were the Israeli jeeps and watchtowers presiding over Palestine Square and elsewhere, the garbage overflowing from unemptied rubbish bins, and the graffiti scrawled on every spare inch of wall.

Situated at the northern end of the Gaza Strip and running along the Mediterranean Sea, Gaza City (and the Strip in general) have never been able to recover from the massive inflow of refugees during the 1967 war. With a population density rate among the highest in the world, Gaza became known for its overcrowding, inadequate infrastructure, sewage and waste systems, and its militant refugee camps, birthplace of the intifada.

Gaza City still has a lot of dirt and sand and unpaved streets. But it also has a strip of luxury hotels, new city parks, smart government offices, and office and housing blocks which dot the skyline. Despite overall financial hardship in the Strip, Gaza City has enjoyed a boom period following the installation of the Palestinian Authority, the increased public sector employment, and the influence of this expansion on the services and construction sectors.

Far more people are working in Gaza City, and housing and land prices have soared. Internally, people who previously had refused to relocate from refugee housing and who could afford to, now moved to the city to take up jobs with the PA. For the past four years, it seemed that everywhere one looked, the eye fell on a construction site.

On November 3, a fire broke out in al-Quds Tower, an apartment building in Gaza City's Yarmouk neighborhood. While only one person was injured, there was widespread panic during the incident, as the housing block does not have a fire escape or separate fire stairs, and has no fire extinguishers or other equipment which might have helped put out the blaze in its early stages.

Badr Husseini, a civil engineer, says the lack of safety provisions in al-Quds Tower is not surprising. The problem, he says, is not that there are no safety regulations. In fact, under the Palestinian Authority's Department of Civil Defense, safety regulations have been enacted for new housing projects which stipulate that fire exits must be included in the construction, each floor must be equipped with fire extinguishers, and each building should have water tanks and hoses on the roof and in the basement, along with stand-alone generators to run the water pumps. However, says Husseini, the problems is how to bring pre-existing buildings into line with these new safety regulations. In many cases, fitting an outside fire escape or fire stairs is impossible: there is simply no room outside or inside the building, or the cost is prohibitive and the owners cannot afford it.

Gaza City experienced a massive building boom in 1993-94 in expectation of the arrival of the Palestinian Authority and the returnees that autonomy would bring. At the time, however, the government was just getting established; there were no ministries in place which had the capacity to monitor the feverish construction. The municipality, while old and established, was facing a rapid expansion in responsibility due to the imminent changeover, and it too had no capacity to monitor new housing projects.

Into this bureaucratic and legal vacuum, new housing blocks went up rapidly. Last year's fire in one of them, the Palestine Towers, started rumors spreading about the safety hazards of apartments such as these. Some people said that the problem was that the towers went up as high as ten floors, while the fire brigade's ladders only extended four floors up. The panic which occurred at the al-Quds Tower fire is one result of these and other rumors. Despite the fact that the results of the investigation have not yet been released, people are already saying that the al-Quds fire was caused by faulty wiring and warning of fires in other, similar, apartment blocks.

There are 126 multi-story apartment blocks in the Gaza district governorate. In addition, construction is ongoing at dozens of sites around the city and outside. Following this month's fire, PA president Yasser Arafat ordered the establishment of a "Tower Supervisory Committee", which includes Gaza mayor Aoun Shawwa, the Gaza governor Muhammad al-Qidwa, and members of the police, Civil Defense, and municipality.

The committee is charged with following up on the implementation of newly-legislated safety regulations in already existing housing blocks and new construction projects. Already, advertisements have been published on three different occasions in the major Palestinian daily newspapers, announcing the formation of the committee and the scope of its responsibilities. The committee is to come up with a plan of action for implementation of safety regulations within one month.

The problem cannot be solved so easily, however, says Badr Husseini. If there is no way that a building constructed prior to the installation of the Palestinian Authority can now be fitted with either indoor or outdoor fire stairs, the government has little recourse against the owner. Fining or otherwise penalizing owners is unrealistic, given that when they built, there were no regulations in force. Demolition of the buildings is an obvious non-option. And renovation of the buildings at the government's expense would be prohibitive.

The problem of pre-existing buildings did not originate only with the Israeli authorities, when few housing blocks went up, nor with the Palestinian Authority, but with the transition period when there was a regulatory vacuum. Now, however, it is the PA's difficult task to protect the safety of those people living in these buildings and prevent the "Towering Inferno" scenario people are already predicting.