Bob Cratchit: Mr Scrooge?
Ebenezer: I'm busy.
Bob Cratchit: Well, it's about Mr Marley, sir! He's dying!
Ebenezer: Well, what do you want me to do about it? If he's dying, he's dying.
-- Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol
There was a time in this city when fairly large flats in most areas were affordable for almost anyone with a decent job. The current situation, however, is such that you will either have to rob someone, be corrupted and therefore earn illegally, or work two simultaneous jobs to support your family after you have paid your rent.
This, however, is about the greedy landlords (or ladies) of our country who make us bleed financially by taking from us, on a monthly basis, a ridiculous amount of rent for the worst of accommodations without any consideration for the fact that the place they are renting out is almost never worth the value of the asking rent price.
As soon as we read about the High Court’s ruling on the enforcement of the House Rent Control Act, 1991, we finally found some hope for affordable living in our beloved city once again. Over the years, the rent situation has become appalling and unbearable.
If you are a person with a reasonable income, renting a place in Dhaka for a considerable amount of time, you already know how high the rent and advance deposit are for residential establishments around the city.
Firstly, there is the problem with the deposit money. Let’s say you have found a place in a decent area with two bedrooms, two bathrooms, and no balcony or terrace. In an ideal scenario, the landlord should ask for a month’s rent in advance as security and the current month’s rent excluding utility bills.
What really happens nowadays is that the landlord will ask you for three months’ security deposit along with the rent without further negotiations. You, disheartened, would then start looking around for more options and find out that it’s pretty much the same everywhere, or worse. Maybe you even opt for sharing a place with someone, while your wife and children are always uncomfortable.
Secondly, there is the problem with the amount of rent that is asked for. There are people who get to work every day from very inconvenient places simply because they cannot afford a flat near their school or workplace. This led to the rise in rent prices in the so-called “residential areas” such as Dhanmondi or Gulshan.
Dhaka itself has become a city of demand. The rise in population in Dhaka has led to hospitals, universities, schools, shopping malls, and eateries to spring up everywhere. There are only a few places that can truly be labelled as being “residential.”
Being a long-time resident of Gulshan, all I can say is that it is the least posh area in today’s Dhaka city. Landlords of this area and other similar areas do not seem to feel so and rent out their places in exchange of a ridiculously priced monthly commitment from their tenants.
A search in lamudi.com and other sites will show how rent prices can range from Tk50,000 to lakhs in these areas. While one may argue that it is fair for rent prices to be high in areas housing embassies and international agencies, the situation is not so drastically different for other areas.
We recently went to see a two-bedroom flat in Eskaton Garden. The 700sq-ft flat was dingy, damp, and had no means of ventilation. The rent, however, was an impressive Tk20,000 (excluding utilities and service charge) with an asking deposit of BDT60,000. We had to roll our eyes.
Lastly, a few words about the service charge. Even when you compromise on the rent, it is hard to do the same with service charges. The service charge can range from Tk3,000 to Tk6,000. You pay that chunk of your hard-earned money in the name of the building’s maintenance costs, one parking space if you are lucky, and for the guards of the building.
While it will be wrong to say that all apartment buildings are not well maintained, the number of those are few. Apartment buildings have poor electrical wiring, they are damp, infested with pests of all kinds, and have guards/building managers who are often very ill-behaved and dishonest.
Behind the shiny façade of these apartment buildings, there are thousands of us who are facing these problems along with other acute problems arising from non-maintenance of the sewerage and the water lines, broken lifts and what not. Apartments usually have the “no guest cars allowed sign” on the gates with no consideration that some tenants, who are not car owners, are paying the service charge for a parking lot which deserves a car space for the tenant’s guest.
Some may say this is perfectly fine. Any independent land or home-owner has the right to ask for whatever sum of rent they want, wand if you cannot pay, then look elsewhere, which is possibly in an area significantly far away from where you work, and is far less convenient to move around from. But of course, the owner has their own rights as they built their establishment with their hard-earned or inherited money not to stay poor.
What many of us fail to realise is that working people paying extortionate amounts of rent remove a lot of money from the economy, thus reducing not only our purchasing power, but also a big chunk of what could have been the sum we pay as VAT for things we purchase, thus hindering the targeted amount of taxes to be collected by the government. And we all know that, apart from VAT, our government is usually deprived of most of the tax money they are supposed to receive originally.
This also affects us -- we who are actually the majority. Our savings are becoming less than planned for, our travelling time gets multiplied manifold, and we are basically left in fatigue and misery. We struggle to put money aside as rainy-day savings and having insurance become a real challenge.
For poor families, this is even more out of the question. A room in a shanty house rents for around Tk5,000, making survival in the city hard for the working class. None of this strikes us until a bread-earner of the family falls ill, or, worst case scenario, dies and then we understand how much of our money is getting lost in something that is a product of greed.
So, what did the High Court do? Well, authorities concerned did their math and came up with a solution along with an act, thereafter placing it to the court for enactment and enforcement for compliance. As far as we have learned so far, the House Rent Control Act will direct home owners to abide by a basic law that, for each home, they will charge a tenant an annual rent that is 15% of the total value of that home.
For instance, assuming Gulshan as the area of interest, if an apartment of 3,500sq-ft is ideally priced at Tk60 lakhs, then the total annual rent should be Tk9 lakhs, with monthly rent becoming Tk75,000. Currently, the general asking rent for such an apartment is over Tk1.75 lakhs per month or more. And we still call ourselves citizens of a poor country!
Only God knows how most people manage to earn that much money. The tremendous greed of landlords that we end up paying for needs an intervention from the state. It is encouraging to see that the authorities are finally thinking about it and trying to solve the problem.
What they should be most strict about are the various loop-holes that appear all of a sudden when such rules become applicable by law, and more than often we see that, rather than complying with such laws, the rich and powerful simply bypass them. The authorities must take care of these matters with firm hands, and also keep a routine check on landlords on whether they are paying their taxes on time and also keeping their establishments habitable for their tenants.
We are already burdened with a lot in this city, with all the road constructions and dense traffic; it is our basic right to at least have a safe shelter for our beloved family members and provide them with the security they deserve.