Himanshu SK spent three years inside the Toyota Building, long enough to fill two apartments, Block A and then Block B, with the kind of ordinary memories that quietly define a life abroad. When he understood the 15-storey complex was coming down, he posted a farewell video on Instagram. It was a small gesture, but it captured something real about what the building meant to the hundreds of residents now packing up and leaving.
The Nasser Rashid Lootah Building, known to almost everyone in Dubai as the Toyota Building, is scheduled for demolition in 2027. Building management confirmed the timeline and told residents with valid rental contracts they must vacate by December 2026. Around 70 percent of tenants have already gone.
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The departure accelerated sharply after authorities disconnected the building’s electricity supply, a measure tied to concerns about illegally partitioned apartments. Some units had been divided into rooms housing as many as 15 people, raising serious safety and occupancy concerns. Building management attributed the disconnection to Dubai Municipality, though that reasoning has not been independently confirmed. For many residents, losing power made the decision for them.
Those who stayed longer describe the choice to leave as genuinely painful. One resident, who asked not to be named, told Gulf News that their family had lived there for six years. The building’s dated appearance and aging facilities were beside the point. What mattered was its location near Sheikh Zayed Road and rents that bore no resemblance to what the surrounding Downtown Dubai market now demands. Finding anything comparable nearby, the resident explained, was close to impossible.
SK said the same thing. Location and cost kept him there despite the building’s age. Another former resident recalled watching New Year’s Eve fireworks from the building’s vantage point, surrounded by neighbours. That social texture, the easy familiarity of a long-established community, is what many say they will miss most. A restaurant operating beneath the building told Gulf News it remains open for now but expects to close as the residential population continues to thin.
The building’s story begins in 1974, when Dubai’s skyline was barely a sketch of what it would become. The 15-storey structure, standing roughly 65 metres tall, was among the first three buildings constructed near the First Roundabout on Sheikh Zayed Road. Its nickname arrived in 1981, when a neon Toyota sign was installed on the roof. That red logo became so associated with the building that when the sign came down in 2018 after an advertising contract expired, residents noticed the absence. Toyota UAE reinstated it in June 2022, nearly four years later.
The complex held one-, two-, and three-bedroom apartments that housed families and individuals from across the world for more than five decades. Its presence along Sheikh Zayed Road was a fixed point in a city that rarely holds still.
By contrast, what surrounds it now is a skyline the building’s original residents could not have imagined. The demolition is not a surprise in that context, but the human cost is specific and immediate. Staff at the restaurant below confirmed that most residents have already left, though the restaurant itself carries on in the interim, serving a dwindling crowd.
For SK and the others who lived there, the Toyota Building was affordable housing in one of the world’s most expensive cities, a community with a view of the fireworks, and a place that held their years. As they disperse into Dubai’s real estate market, the question is whether anything in that market, at that price, in that location, will ever fill the same role again.