Rumble in the urban jungle

Update: President Michel Sleiman announced he would not sign the rent law on May 7, 2014. The following article appeared in Executive’s print edition on May 1. When Parliament approved the new rent law in early April, the document cleared a major hurdle, only to be confronted with a barrage of protests by people seeking to stop the measure while it was still on its laborious way to the printer via the presidential palace. The impact of the law, which would enable building owners to gradually increase annual rents to the equivalent of 5 percent of an apartment’s value, is difficult to assess given the country’s chronic lack of reliable data; however, it is clearly an issue of humongous proportions as up to 25 percent of rent contracts in the country are subject to the old law. A lobbying group of tenants with old rent contracts staged street protests in