First a bit of background: 14 years ago, I was walking with a friend in the newly rebuilt Beirut Central District, or the Downtown as it is often called. I was, I must confess, slurping the Solidere Kool Aid. But to be fair, the company that rebuilt and developed the bombed-out and bullet-riddled Lebanese capital — and in which Rafik Hariri, the prime minister at the time, had a substantial stake — had done a remarkable job. The area had not only become an instant hit with Lebanese families who flocked there on Sunday afternoons, but also a source of national pride.
But not everyone, it seemed, was convinced. My friend moaned that he missed al ballad, as it was known before the war, an area he said was historically for all Lebanese and not just the middle classes. I told him he was being overly sentimental and unrealistic, arguing that the city centre he had known as a child had gone, that whether he liked it or not Beirut had to start with a clean slate and it would take years, perhaps decades, for it to cultivate the gritty patina of urban authenticity for which he so yearned. The conversation got heated. Couldn’t I see the extent of the crime that had been committed? No actually, I couldn’t. He stormed off and we didn’t talk for weeks.
He now lives in the no doubt still authentic Istanbul, but I thought of him last Tuesday night at around 8pm, when, very near to where we argued, I was overcome with as powerful an epiphany as I have experienced in my 23 years of living in Lebanon. Walking back to the apartment I was using in the heart of the Beirut Central District, past the rolls of razor wire and the bored soldiers on every street corner, I realised that I was, as far as I could tell, the only person in the centre of the Lebanese capital that didn’t have to be there.
It’s a strange sensation to be alone in the heart of a capital city. It felt like a curfew but it wasn’t. And it was at that point I realised my friend, had he been with me, would have delighted in telling me he was right … even if at the time, I would still maintain he was wrong.
It shouldn’t really have come as any surprise to me. On January 5, in this newspaper, I wrote that Solidere “must concede that its master plan for urban rejuvenation has hit a brick wall”, adding that the company must “review its rents and come up with a strategy to lure businesses and people back to the area”. I concluded that “there are some things that are more important than a bottom line”. That was when I still thought the situation was critical. What I didn’t know, until I witnessed it first hand that night, was that the patient had gone into arrest.
Back in 2001, it was easy to support Solidere and its implementation of a government decision to expropriate land in return for shares in the new company. Imagine the chaos if the state had let individual landlords take responsibility for their own property, many of which, left for nearly 20 years, had multiple owners. It would have been a mess. And so for once in consensus-driven Lebanon someone — in this case, Hariri, a hard, uncompromising businessman — took what we all agreed was a tough decision for the common good.
Hariri’s vision was for the new Beirut to be a home away from home for Arab tourists. Putting this vision in the context of the time, it had tangible and obvious economic and environmental benefits. But his assassination on the western fringes of his master plan a decade ago; the subsequent political battles that infected the area and the economic decline brought on by the Syrian civil war, derailed the dream. The robotic Solidere was unable to react. The company had, and still has, one plan: to sell land and fill buildings, but it appears that it hasn’t been able to compute the fact that its rents and land prices don’t reflect the market. And presumably that’s why the area is a ghost town.
Even the ongoing construction work is apparently misleading. A friend who closely monitors real estate activity in the Downtown confided to me that developers are doing the concrete work only so they don’t lose building permits that would cost millions to renew. Sales, he says, are dead.
Solidere’s critics will say they were right all along. Maybe they were, but the deserted streets, closed restaurants and barbed wire are a stark reminder of what happens when a national space becomes a badly run investment.
Michael Karam is a freelance writer who lives between Beirut and Brighton.
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