Renting on Lebanon’s black market

Sitting in the gloom of the single room that is now her family’s home, shadows from the small candle placed between us — the room’s only light — played against the wall as Asmar spoke of her flight from Syria. Asmar, who preferred not to give her surname, is just one of the estimated one million Syrian refugees now renting accommodation in Lebanon. Two years since she arrived in Beirut’s Shatila Palestinian refugee camp, a small bundle of clothes all that she brought from the rubble of her home, Asmar still lives in the room she first rented. With a lack of affordable rental properties, rental prices and eviction rates have soared, while unregistered tenancies, deliberately left without formal contracts to avoid taxation and legal regulation, appear to be the new norm. Since 2011, the influx of Syrians has brought new challenges to Lebanon’s rental market. In an unlit, unheated