By Mariam Rizk and Mohamed Ezz

CAIRO (Reuters) -The rent on Khaddara Ibrahim Ali's cramped apartment in downtown Cairo was just about the only expense she could count on staying stable as waves of soaring inflation and subsidy cuts ate away at her modest income.

Thanks to a decades-old rent cap, Ali, 84, pays just under 11 Egyptian pounds ($0.23) per month for the eighth-story home where she has lived for half a century, overlooking a patchwork of ageing buildings and narrow streets in the Azbakeya district.

But now even that is set to change. In July, Egypt's parliament approved the country's biggest rent overhaul in decades, scrapping rent caps and rules that had let tenants and their heirs stay in their homes indefinitely.

The change, which will take effect for non-residential units over five years and for homes over seven years, impacts millions of households and has raised fears among many tenants who had counted on their rents to ensure a degree of economic stability.

"I'm afraid all the time," Ali said. "After all this familiarity, I would just leave?"

The law applies to "old rent" contracts signed before Jan. 31, 1996, when measures were taken to liberalise the rental market but not applied retroactively to units rented out before that.

Since then, Egypt has seen a huge........

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