Dubai’s ceaseless boom is putting strains on its residents

Skyscraper-studded Dubai has been on a hot streak for the last five years — and some residents are starting to feel burned. The city-state has seen record-breaking real estate transactions and as more and more people come to live there, and its state-owned airline Emirates is booking record earnings. But all that growth comes with strains for the city’s population.

Traffic feels worse than ever on Dubai’s roads. The price of housing continues to spike even with new real estate projects being announced almost daily. Caught in the middle are both its Emirati citizens and the vast population of foreigners who power its economy — sparking rare public expressions of concern.

“Dubai is on steroids but affordability risks are increasing,” warned Hasnain Malik in a starkly titled report he wrote for the global data firm Tellimer, where he’s a managing director. Under Dubai’s current plans, the city aims to have 5.8 million residents by 2040, adding more than half its current estimated population in just 15 years. Since 1980, its population has already soared from around 255,000 to around 3.8 million.

Real estate lit the fire in Dubai’s growth in 2002, when the desert sheikdom began allowing foreigners to own property. After sharp falls during both the 2008-2009 financial crisis and Dubai’s brief coronavirus lockdown, prices have been soaring. Today, average prices per square foot are at all-time highs, according to Property Monitor. Rental prices increased as much as 20% in key neighborhoods last year, with further rises likely this year, with some residents moving to communities further out in the desert, the real estate firm Engel & Völkers said.

Even before the boom, some people who worked in Dubai chose to live in the neighboring emirate of Sharjah, some 20 kilometers (12 miles) north of the city’s downtown, or further away. Some 1 million commuters from other emirates jam the 12-lane Sheikh Zayed Road that runs through the center of the city and other highways every day, as studies suggest that as many as four out of five employees drive to work alone.

That traffic has only intensified with Dubai’s new arrivals. While the rest of the world saw as much as a 4% increase in the number of registered vehicles in the last two years, the city’s Road and Transportation Authority says there’s been a 10% increase in the number of vehicles.

So many vehicles have been registered that the city has had to make license plates longer. And while the city keeps building new flyovers and other road improvements, more cars are coming from more directions than ever before.

“Dubai is very attractive, more and more people are coming,” said Thomas Edelmann, the founder and managing director of RoadSafetyUAE, which advocates about traffic issues. “I think it’s easier to get people quickly to come to Dubai and to convince them about Dubai, then to build a new intersection or a new highway.”

Congestion has got so bad that it’s driving even prominent Emiratis to break their customary silence on public affairs. Habib Al Mulla, a prominent Emirati lawyer, wrote on the social platform X in December that while authorities were working on congestion, the problem demanded “a set of immediate and long-term mechanisms.” He followed up by publishing an opinion piece twice mentioning “congestion” as being among “pressing issues” for global cities like Dubai.

While phrased in mild language, Al Mulla’s comments represented rare public criticism in the United Arab Emirates, where speech is tightly controlled by criminal law and social norms favor raising issues at a “majlis” — a semiprivate setting convened by a traditional ruler.

“The concentration of wealth and opportunities created in global cities may cause income inequality that pushes out lower-income residents,” Al Mulla warned in the English-language Khaleej Times newspaper on Jan. 15. “The problem becomes acute when the wealth and opportunities remain inaccessible to segments of the national population who witness the city’s allure being seized by outsiders. This may carry significant social risks, if not mitigated.”