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Where Are the Best Places to Live in France?

Where Are the Best Places to Live in France?

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According to International Living Magazine, there is nowhere better to live in the world than France. Earlier this year the influential publication examined 194 countries on 9 specific criteria such as culture, climate and crime, and France came out on top -- for the fifth year running! For us Britons that's fortunate, because France is on our doorstep and it's therefore an easy country to escape to. . .

. . .and it's a good thing that we can so easily access beautiful France for a better quality of more affordable life! However, a more in-depth study of what it's like to live specifically in France reveals that there is a great deal of difference between the various departments and regions.

So, where are the best places to live in France? The answer is of course 'it depends' -- i.e., it depends what you're looking for from life. France's L'Express magazine has taken it upon itself to examine the whole of France based on a range of criteria that determine quality of life, and it's findings are invaluable if you are thinking of living in France.

Where to Live in France if You're Moving with Children in Tow

Based on where there are the best schools and educational facilities, the best shopping and also employment prospects, L'Express has rated the following department as the top three for families: -

1 - Haute-Garonne in the Midi Pyrenees
2 - Pyrénées-Atlantiques in Aquitaine
3 -- Vendée in Pays de la Loire

Each department scored well on average for the type of criteria families typically place on a destination. . .and so these are recommended spots for you to explore if you're thinking of relocating to France with children in tow.

Where to Live in France if You're Thinking of Retiring

For those aged 50+, schools and employment prospects will be less important of course, whereas health care facilities, where residents are healthiest and live longest, where the quality of the environment and the climate are favourable and where crime is less will be important factors. As a result L'Express rated the following departments as the top three for would-be retirees: -

1 - Hautes-Alpes in Provence Alpes -- Cote D'Azur
2 -- Corrèze in Limousin
3 -- Aveyron in the Midi-Pyrenes

Where is the Best Place in France for Affordable Property?

If you're looking to move to France and the one thing driving your desire is the fact that you can hopefully afford a beautiful home then the following departments should be considered by you: -

1 - Indre in the Centre region
2 - Nièvre in Burgundy
3 - Meuse in Lorraine

Although Creuse, the Correze and the Haute Loire are all also worth a look if you're after an affordable place to live.

Where To Live in France for the Best Weather

When it comes to the weather, we usually think the hotter the better, but the French think it's important to look at climate as a whole when thinking about the best environment in which to live -- as a result it's probably unsurprising that the Mediterranean region came out on top. It offers stunning summer weather as we well know, but at the same time the winters are far less harsh as well, meaning that Var and Bouches-du-Rhône from the Provence Alpes -- Cote D'Azur region took joint first place for their climate.

The Best Place to Live in France for the Good of Your Health

If you're looking to move abroad to escape the stresses of everyday life and you're concerned about your health and accessing the best healthcare on offer across the Channel then the following are L'Express's top 3 destinations for health tourists!

1 -- Paris
2 - Bouches-du-Rhône in the Provence Alpes -- Cote D'Azur region
3 - Gironde in Aquitaine

The Overall Top 20 Places to Live in France

L'Express magazine looked at a whole host of criteria from where the climate is better to where the natural environment has been well preserved, (Lozère, Ariège and then the Pyrénées-Orientales in case you were wondering), and ultimately it placed the 96 departments in one long ordered list. The overall top 20 places to live in France from their detailed analysis are therefore as follows: -

1 - Haute-Garonne
2 - Pyrénées-Atlantiques
3 - Ille-et-Vilaine
4 - Isère
5 - Gironde
6 - Hérault
7 - Maine-et-Loire
8 - Rhône
9 - Vienne
10 - Vendée
11 - Loire-Atlantique
12 - Côte-d'Or
13 - Corrèze
14 - Alpes-Maritimes
15 - Indre-et-Loire
16 - Bas-Rhin
17 - Savoie
18 - Doubs
19 - Haute-Savoie
20 - Puy-de-Dôme

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Paris Update: Landlord Fined for Short Term Vacation Rental

original Article:

http://www.lepoint.fr/societe/paris-un-loueur-de-meubles-touristiques-condamne-a-15-000-euros-d-amende-13-04-2012-1451300_23.php

English Google Translation of Point.fr Article: Please inquire if you require further clarifications.

A Paris Landlord was condemned at the beginning of April some referred to two fines of a total of 15 000 Euros to have rented to Paris as "tourist furnished" four apartments intend for the dwelling, one has learn Friday of judicial source.  It was equally constrained, by the president of the high court of ruling Paris in referred April 5, to reestablish the usage of foreseen dwelling for these apartments in the two months, under penalty of to have to pour 200 Euros of fine a day of delay and by apartment. 

A trial of strength opposes for several months the city Hall of Paris that wishes, in the name of the equitable access to the lodging, put the holà to the explosion of the housings of furnishings in the capital, to real estate agencies and special.  The law foresees that to Paris any transformation of a local one of dwelling for another usage must obtain the authorization of the city hall and is subordinated to compensations, under form for example transformation in dwelling of a local other in the concerned zone. 

20% of the rental offer

For two years, the floor of Paris and the city hall undertook, by judicial way, to prevent the misappropriations of their usage of dwelling of situated apartments in the center of the capital and rented by way of "tourist furnished" to the passage tourists.  According to the city Hall of Paris, in five years, close to 20 000 lodgings have "summer subtract to the traditional rental market" and "in certain districts the housings of tourist furnishings represent until 20% of the rental offer". 

The city hall considers that the practiced prices for the furnishings oscillate between the double and the triple one of the prices for the traditional housings and that this phenomenon "provokes a decrease of the rental traditional private offer and an increase of the cost of the lodgings". 

French Version:

Un bailleur a été condamné début avril en référé à deux amendes d'un total de 15 000 euros pour avoir loué à Paris comme "meublés touristiques" quatre appartements destinés à l'habitation, a-t-on appris vendredi de source judiciaire. Il a également été contraint, par le président du tribunal de grande instance de Paris statuant en référé le 5 avril, à rétablir l'usage d'habitation prévu pour ces appartements dans les deux mois, sous peine de devoir verser 200 euros d'amende par jour de retard et par appartement.

Un bras de fer oppose depuis plusieurs mois la Mairie de Paris qui souhaite, au nom de l'accès équitable au logement, mettre le holà à l'explosion des locations de meublés dans la capitale, à des agences immobilières et des particuliers. La loi prévoit qu'à Paris toute transformation d'un local d'habitation pour un autre usage doit obtenir l'autorisation de la mairie et est subordonnée à des compensations, sous forme par exemple de la transformation en habitation d'un autre local dans la zone concernée.

20 % de l'offre locative

Depuis deux ans, le parquet de Paris et la mairie ont entrepris, par voie judiciaire, d'empêcher les détournements de leur usage d'habitation d'appartements situés dans le centre de la capitale et loués à titre de "meublés touristiques" aux touristes de passage. Selon la Mairie de Paris, en cinq ans, près de 20 000 logements ont "été soustraits au marché locatif traditionnel" et "dans certains arrondissements les locations de meublés touristiques représentent jusqu'à 20 % de l'offre locative".

La mairie estime que les prix pratiqués pour les meublés oscillent entre le double et le triple des prix pour les locations traditionnelles et que ce phénomène "provoque une diminution de l'offre locative privée traditionnelle et une hausse du coût des logements".

Last Resort: In Hippie Holdout, a Fight Over Worms and Moats

By PATRICIA LEIGH BROWN,NYT – LAGUNITAS, Calif. — To find David Lee Hoffman’s front door, take a right at the bell tower and proceed past the moat with a boat named Titanic II. Step — gingerly — through the stone tunnel, then follow the brick steps up to the Worm Palace and the breathtaking view of the Solar Power Shower Tower.
You can’t miss it.
For the last 40 years, Mr. Hoffman, 67, an entrepreneur who specializes in rare aged tea leaves, has been building a Chinese- and Tibetan-inspired compound on a steep hill in this unincorporated hippie holdover in western Marin County where the general store has a community piano and sells clothing “made with peace and love.”
The village has long prided itself on its pristine beauty and live-and-let-live attitude. But that was before the bitter dispute that pitted Mr. Hoffman, with his unconventional techniques for living in what he calls a sustainable way, against county code enforcers whose demands for permits he has repeatedly ignored.
The case, which is now in the hands of a state administrative judge, has riven his neighbors in the wooded glen they share. Until recently, the loudest voices to be heard had been only the native frogs, whose cacophony Mr. Hoffman can rouse at will by yelling “Ribet!” into the papyrus plants of his upper moat.

Mr. Hoffman, who has been called the Indiana Jones of tea, may be the ultimate do-it-yourselfer. But the county has issues with the 30 or so structures he has built over the years.

Chief among its concerns is his method of disposing and recycling waste. It is called vermicomposting, in which colonies of worms, micro-organisms and carbon-rich leaves turn waste into humus. Water from the shower and kitchen sink flow into the upper moat, along with food scraps digested in Mr. Hoffman’s copper-shingled Taj Mahal for worms. The resulting “gray water” passes through filters before being piped into the garden to nurture Peruvian potatoes, French sorrel and other vegetables.

Mr. Hoffman and his wife, Ratchanee Chaikamwung, who is known as Bee and is from Thailand, forgo soap, washing dishes with a mix of wood ash and oyster shells. In place of a conventional toilet, they use self-contained chambers with a worm-composting system. Compost privies are not allowed in Marin County.

The possibility of the moats overflowing into a nearby salmon creek is yet another concern. “We have given David notice many times about requiring construction permits,” said Debbi Poiani, the county’s senior code-enforcement specialist.

“But even through red tags, he’s just continued on his merry way,” she added, referring to the code violation stickers.

Mr. Hoffman’s pursuit of handmade teas and artisanal growers in China was the subject of a 2007 documentary, “All in This Tea,” by Les Blank and Gina Leibrecht, filmmakers who are documenting the rise of his compound, which he calls the Last Resort. Complete with a cave for aging Pu-erh leaves in long bamboo containers and a tea house, it is part Himalayan kingdom, part Dogpatch rife with construction debris.

“I wanted to show that there are distinctive nonpolluting ways to live on the planet,” Mr. Hoffman explained over tea and chapatis made from his heirloom wheat. “In my mind, I thought I could demonstrate to the county that these systems work.”

The county remains unconvinced: it gave the couple notice to “cease occupancy” until an approved septic system is installed and the buildings, walls and moats are brought up to code. Mr. Hoffman also faces roughly $200,000 in fines for building without permits and for running the Phoenix Collection, his latest tea business, on the premises.

To his supporters, Mr. Hoffman’s improvisational architecture is a woodsy Watts Towers, the mosaic-encrusted concrete and steel cultural landmark in Los Angeles.

Like George Lucas and the Grateful Dead, Mr. Hoffman “helps to put Marin on the map as a place of unique creativity and originality,” a neighbor, Vernon Castle, argued in a letter to the county (although Mr. Lucas is not without his own issue, having just scratched a plan to build a digital technology complex in West Marin after intense opposition).

The son of a wallpaper manufacturer, Mr. Hoffman grew up in Oakland, Calif., and was a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War. He spent a decade backpacking through Tibet, Nepal and elsewhere in Asia before settling in Marin in 1973. He started a business based on a process he invented for cleaning ancient textiles using sound vibrations. “I was cleaning pieces that were worth more than my house,” he said. “Tea was easy and quiet.”

But his fanatical construction project reflects a soft-spoken intensity. To build the tea house roof, for instance, Mr. Hoffman, who is afraid of heights, recruited former Cirque du Soleil performers to teach him how to suspend safely in midair.

He insists that he thought he had the county’s unofficial blessing. “I did what I felt was right,” he said. He added, “My love of the planet is greater than my fear of the law.”

The travails of Hoffman began when Chuck Ford, a neighbor, accused him of building over the property line. Mr. Ford said he agreed to sell the land to Mr. Hoffman for $4,000 — money he says he has yet to receive. A legal dispute played out over 17 years. “I think he honestly felt that because he wanted our property, it was rightfully his,” Mr. Ford said by e-mail.

Sim Van der Ryn, a specialist in sustainable architecture who is consulting with Mr. Hoffman, said the only way to bring the buildings into compliance would be to tear everything down.

Steve Kinsey, a Marin County supervisor, said the affair may require some alternative thinking. “It’s an expression of complete and blatant disregard for collaborating with authorities,” he said. “But it is also the life work of a creative individual.” He added, “Marin has a history of nonconformity. We want to keep it that way.”

Paris is now the biggest real estate investment destination in Europe

Paris is now the biggest real estate investment destination in Europe, having overtaken London in the second half of last year according to new data released by CB Richard Ellis.

In its survey of European capital markets, CBRE reports that investment volumes in Paris hit 7.9 billion Euros in 2H 2011, up from 3.6 billion Euros in the first half of the year. With this Paris pipped London at the post with its 7.8 billion Euros investment volume.

The office sector drove the surge in Paris investment according to the report, with a mixture of single-asset and large portfolio transactions. With turnover up 30.7% in the second half of 2011, Paris now accounts for over 14% of the European real estate investment market according to CBRE.

The report also highlights a recovery in Moscow real estate investment. With 2.6 billion Euros invested in the second half, compared to 1.9 bn in the first half, Moscow overtook Berlin to become the sixth biggest real estate investment market in Europe.

CBRE believes investment in Moscow will continue to grow. 'Domestic investors account for the majority of commercial real estate investment in Russia. Once foreign investors recover their appetite for Russia, we can expect Russia to rise further, not least as it is one of Europe's three megapolises,' said Christopher Peters, CBRE research director for Russia.

The report's market by market analysis shows strong year on year growth in real estate investment for 2011 as a whole in France and Germany, while investment shrank in Ireland, Italy, Portugal, Spain and the UK. In fact, in Ireland only 8 deals were done in 2011 almost every one following a repossession, and in Portugal only 15 deals were done. This shows that while bond investors may have eased up of late, property investors are still shaky when it comes to the sovereign debt crisis.

Building the American Dream in China

 

By BROOK LARMER

Published: March 16, 2012

Daniel Gillen is afraid of heights. The young American architect didn’t think to tell me this until we had already climbed up a construction ladder and started walking gingerly across the curved roof of an unfinished building in northeastern China.

It was a frigid day in late February, with temperatures dropping to 15 degrees below zero, and the roof’s undulating steel surface made it feel as if we were surfing on a frozen ocean wave — one that, at this height, promised a very hard landing.

“We’d never get away with this in the U.S.,” Gillen said with a nervous laugh.

From the roof, Gillen and I gazed out at a vast new city that didn’t exist two years ago. Row after row of 20-story apartment towers radiated out in every direction, in regimented monotony as far as we could see. There were hundreds of towers, almost all of them empty. “When I first came here two years ago, this area was just a bunch of fields covered with construction cranes,” said Gillen, who is 32. Now the farmlands outside Harbin have been transformed into one of the dozens of insta-cities rising around China. “Standing here,” Gillen said, “you just have to be in awe of what China can accomplish.”

The building beneath Gillen’s black leather boots inspired a different sort of wonder. A whimsical, torquing 660-foot-long tube sheathed in stainless steel, the Harbin Wood Sculpture Museum is the architectural fantasy of Gillen’s boss, Ma Yansong, and his team at MAD Architects in Beijing. The building’s design evokes the natural world — an iceberg, say, or a piece of driftwood — but given its backdrop, I couldn’t help thinking that it looked like a shimmering spaceship that had touched down unexpectedly in an alien urban landscape.

In that respect, it is not so different from Gillen himself, whose shaved head, muscular build and thick silver thumb ring make him something of an oddity in this city on China’s northern frontier. When Gillen was laid off in December 2008 by Asymptote Architecture, a New York firm, he hunkered down in his Brooklyn apartment, trying to stave off the “vibe of hopelessness.” Six months passed. His profession had been flattened by the financial crisis that put an abrupt halt to new construction. Gillen sent out dozens of résumés, but no offers came. Then, in early summer, he spotted a job posting for MAD Architects on a design Web site. The firm’s acronym seemed to sum up the outlandish proposition. “China was not on my radar at all,” he told me. The starting salary at MAD was half of what he earned in New York. Desperate, Gillen jumped.

Up on the museum’s sloping steel roof, his fear under control, Gillen marveled at his good fortune. “This kind of project,” he said, “could not be built anywhere else in the world today.” Nor could Gillen have found such an opportunity if he hadn’t journeyed 6,000 miles from home.

Over the past three years, foreign architects and designers have poured into China, fleeing economic crises at home and pinning their hopes on this country’s explosive growth. It is, after all, a place that McKinsey & Company predicts will build 50,000 skyscrapers in the next two decades, the equivalent of 10 New Yorks. MAD’s staff consisted almost entirely of mainland Chinese when Gillen arrived in mid-2009; today, nearly half of his 50 colleagues are foreigners, with designers from Holland, Germany, Belgium, Spain, Colombia, Japan and Thailand. “The economic crisis,” Gillen says, “is a heavy factor in everybody’s thought process.”

This is the expected global economic formula flipped on its head: instead of American workers losing out to the Chinese, China is providing jobs for foreign architects. Even more surprising is the degree of imaginative license that China offers, even demands of, its foreign building designers. With new cities materializing seemingly overnight, international architects are free to think big, to experiment with cutting-edge designs, to introduce green technologies. All at a frantic pace. In a top-down system that favors political will and connections over regulatory oversight and public debate, large-scale projects in China can be designed, built and put to use in the space of just a few years.

China, of course, is not new terrain for international architects. Many top American firms have run offices inside China for a decade or more. Nearly all of the country’s iconic modern buildings have been designed by foreigners, from the National Stadium, known as the Bird’s Nest, (by the Swiss firm Herzog and de Meuron) and the gravity-defying China Central Television Tower (by the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas) to the 128-story Shanghai Tower (by San Francisco’s Gensler), which will be the second-tallest building in the world when it’s completed in 2014. The new arrivals, though, come not by invitation or out of curiosity but because they need work. They are, as Michael Tunkey, head of the China office for the North American firm Cannon Design, says, “refugees from the economic crisis.”

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The scale and speed of China’s expansion is like nothing these architects experienced in their home countries. Fueled by rising prosperity and the largest rural-to-urban shift in history — some 300 million Chinese became city dwellers over the past two decades — the boom has utterly transformed the eastern seaboard around Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. The fastest growth now is taking place deep in the country’s interior or on its outer edges in cities little known in the West: Harbin, Changsha, Chengdu and dozens of others. “It’s still shocking to me,” says Manuel Sanchez-Vera, a 43-year-old architect who shuttered his own Madrid practice two years ago and joined a midsize Australian firm in Shanghai. “I just got out of a meeting to design a hospital for a city that will grow from 4 million to 10 million in the next few years. How do you design for an explosion like that?”

The answer to that question, in the main, is quickly and cheaply. While some marquee projects — like the Harbin museum Gillen is working on — attract a lot of attention, most foreign architects in China are designing office towers, housing developments, hospitals and shopping malls, projects in which creativity is in constant tension with the bottom line. Despite the excitement over the flow of projects — indeed, the mere existence of work — there is also a deeper concern: all those empty apartment buildings in Harbin and elsewhere suggest that China’s building boom may have passed its peak.

For now, though, Gillen sees no better alternative. “I’m an architect, I like to build,” he says. “And China is a place where things get built.”

In December 2008, right around the time Gillen joined the ranks of the unemployed in Brooklyn, another young American architect lost his job in San Francisco. Adam Mayer, then 26, received his pink slip one year after joining Skidmore, Owings & Merrill.

The rejection stung. Mayer, a glib and gregarious University of Southern California graduate, had long aspired to work at SOM — a blue-chip firm whose San Francisco office was not far from his family’s home in Silicon Valley. Unlike Gillen, though, Mayer saw no point in sending out résumés or nursing the hope of an economic recovery. “I didn’t even bother looking for a job,” he told me. “All my U.S.C. friends were hitting a brick wall, and the only projects on SOM’s drawing boards seemed to be in China. So I just bought a ticket to Beijing. I had nothing to lose.”

Mayer spoke no Mandarin. And, like many designers, he had not yet passed the arduous set of exams needed to obtain an architect’s license in the states. “Legally, in the U.S., I can’t call myself an architect,” Mayer said. “But in China, it doesn’t matter.”

Four months after arriving in Beijing, Mayer landed a full-time position at a large Singaporean firm with offices around China. The one catch: Mayer had to move to Chengdu, the capital of southwestern Sichuan Province and the front line of the Chinese government’s Develop the West campaign. About 300 Chinese staff members filled the large open space of the company’s Chengdu office. Only a handful, mostly Chinese with overseas passports, spoke English. Besides Mayer, there was just one other Westerner, a young Argentine designer.

During his year at SOM in San Francisco, Mayer worked primarily on one building, and his role was subordinate. But his bosses in Chengdu were asking him to prepare conceptual designs for a series of huge projects: a 1.5-million-square-foot redevelopment zone in central Chengdu, a vast new residential area for China’s biggest housing developer, even a new headquarters for Chengdu’s urban-planning bureau. “I had a ton of creative freedom,” Mayer says. “If you ask architects coming out of grad school, they all say they want to be conceptual designers. So it was great at first.”

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The pace was relentless. From designing one or two projects a month, Mayer was soon being pushed to produce one large-scale conceptual design every week. “The deadlines were crazy,” Mayer says. “Sometimes we’d have three days to finish a 250,000-square-meter project.” Even so, his Chinese colleagues churned out even more. “In terms of pure production, the local staff could work faster and more efficiently than anything I’ve ever seen in the U.S.,” Mayer says, even if in some instances they saw no shame in “literally copying designs right out of a book.”

Creativity was supposed to be Mayer’s job. Like most foreign architects in China, he was hired with the expectation that he would give designs an innovative edge — along with the prestige that many Chinese still associate with a foreign name. (More than once, Mayer was invited to sit silently at client meetings, even when he knew nothing about the project under discussion.) Mayer helped create some stunning designs, including a plan for a state-owned publisher’s headquarters that drew inspiration from ancient Chinese scrolls. Still, the mantra was always “Bigger, bolder, flashier.” During one meeting at the urban-planning bureau, Mayer recalls an official who implored them, “Make us a landmark that will stand out and make people notice!”

The question of whether China can innovate looms over the country’s quest to move beyond its role as the world’s factory. In architecture, Mayer says, the problem is not simply an education system that stresses technical skills over abstract thinking but also the pressure cooker that compels developers to build as fast and as profitably as possible. For all the lip service given to creativity, he says, too often the results are cookie-cutter developments that make Chinese cities feel depressingly similar — and surpassingly ugly. “To come up with something new and creative takes time,” he says, “and in China, there’s not the luxury of time.”

One morning in February, Gillen showed me around MAD Architects’ open-plan studio in Beijing, which occupies the top two floors of a defunct printing plant in a narrow alleyway. Rows of Chinese and foreign architects were working in an almost sepulchral silence, surrounded by models of their fanciful projects: on one end of the second floor, there was a twisting, layered skyscraper designed for Chongqing, on the other a swirly cross section of an opera house and a performing-arts center whose construction Gillen was also overseeing in Harbin.

Occupying the studio’s central space, however, was a common Chinese totem: a Ping-Pong table. Not long ago, Gillen, an avid player himself, organized an officewide tournament, with an iPad going to the champion. It wasn’t quite Ping-Pong diplomacy, but the event served to bring the local and foreign staff members closer together.

When Gillen made his blind leap into China, he knew very little about MAD except that its founder, the 37-year-old Ma Yansong, was a rising talent. Ma, who trained at Yale and apprenticed with the British architect Zaha Hadid, is celebrated as the first Chinese architect to win a foreign competition: the Absolute Towers in Toronto. He was proof that China was coming into its own as a creative architectural force. (Further evidence came recently when the 2012 Pritzker Prize — architecture’s top honor — was awarded to another Chinese architect, Wang Shu.)

Ma and Gillen sit a few feet apart, at identical workstations, but the rolls of blueprints that make a sort of miniature skyline on the American’s desk show the role he has taken on. Hired as a designer, Gillen now oversees the building of Ma’s architectural concoctions. “I am the executioner,” he says with a grin. “I just try to get things done without making either my boss or the client unhappy.”

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The client, in the case of the Harbin Wood Sculpture Museum, is the local government, which occupies a glass building with a red Chinese flag next door to the construction site. “The top-down system can make things very simple,” Gillen says. “The leader says, ‘I want it; you make it,’ and it’s done.” Never mind that the projected ticket sales for the museum’s exhibitions, which are anchored by the collected works of a locally renowned wood sculptor, could never match the building’s extravagant price tag.

Such an issue might stop a project in the United States. But in China, the primary concerns are prestige and development for its own sake, and the leaders would move heaven — and lots of earth — to get the museum built. “These projects are the Louis Vuitton bags of architecture,” says one foreign architect, who has worked on several marquee buildings in China. “Every city in China wants one now.”

With all the excitement over architectural possibilities in China, there is a reluctance to address the obvious question: What happens if the social, cultural and economic environment cannot support these cutting-edge designs after they are built? This is already a problem, both for prestige projects and massive urban developments. MAD, for example, has built the voluptuously curved Ordos Museum in a new planned city in Inner Mongolia. But the real estate bubble popped in Ordos last year. The museum now sits forlornly in an empty development, a symbol of architectural achievement as well as the folly of ambition. “These are like the Fields of Dreams,” Gillen says. “Build it, and they will come.” Sometimes, though, they don’t come.

In Harbin, I met two Chinese men in thick coats wandering around the Wood Sculpture Museum. They were trying to decide if it looked more like a whale or a shimmering serpent. “It certainly is unusual,” said one, who identified himself as Mr. Wang and who bought an apartment in one of the high-rises behind the museum two years ago. Did he like the design? “Well, yes,” he said, “because it’s already made my property nearly double in value!”

Gillen is not paid to worry about the museum’s future or its development value — just to ensure that it is built. And that often requires handling shifting demands that would be almost unimaginable back home. When the pit for the wood-sculpture museum’s foundation had already been dug, for instance, the government made a startling request to double the area to 66,000 square feet. The demand meant drafting a new set of designs and digging the foundation several yards larger to create a new underground gallery space. “In the U.S., the contract would’ve been ripped up and renegotiated,” Gillen said. But MAD complied with the request without complaint. It was another lesson in the Chinese art of making guanxi, or cultivating relationships. Who knows what commissions a cooperative attitude might lead to in the future?

Walking through the museum’s cathedral-like interior, with rays of morning sunshine streaming through the skylights, Gillen snapped photos of imperfections: a shattered pane of curved glass, a poorly placed water pipe. He was keenly aware of the shoddy workmanship that has plagued other modern buildings in China. It is one price of excessive speed. “I want to build a monument that lasts,” he says. Even so, he couldn’t get over the pace of progress. “This is a complex project, but we’ve gone from design to nearly finished construction in just two years!” Gillen said. “I’m not saying this system is better than ours back home. But sometimes it seems like the U.S. is sitting on the couch sipping coffee while China is Carl Lewis running as hard as it can.”

It was nearly 1 a.m. on a weeknight in Chengdu, but a band was playing at China Groove, and the expatriate architects seemed in no hurry to leave. Clustered around a table on a night in mid-February were newly arrived architects from Germany, New Zealand and Britain, as well as a young Iranian construction supplier just in from Tehran. The music was blasting, and the young men (yes, a large proportion of the foreign architects in China are men) had to yell to make themselves heard.

“Have you seen the world’s biggest building yet?” shouted Stephan Wurster, an affable 38-year-old Stuttgart native who moved here in December after three years in Beijing. Both he and Kamaljot Singh Panesar, a goateed British architect at the table, have offices in development zones mushrooming on the plains south of Chengdu, not far from a half-completed behemoth called Ocean Park. Under a single roof covering an area of about 25 football fields, Ocean Park is designed to include hotels, shopping malls, aquariums, amusement parks and a simulated ocean with a white-sand beach. (The ultimate “Truman Show” touch: the 660-foot-wide video screen that will allow beachgoers to enjoy brilliant digital sunsets, even when clouds and pollution block the real thing.)

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Wurster takes more than a passing interest in the Chinese-designed building: it stands directly across from the site where he is overseeing construction of a contemporary art center for his bosses at Zaha Hadid Architects. The same Chinese investor behind Ocean Park, in fact, is financing the arts center as a gift to Chengdu. And what city leader wouldn’t be flattered to receive a cultural icon designed by a world-famous architect? Still, Hadid’s firm has had to make compromises — overhauling the sinuous design because local officials thought it looked like a snake, which is considered bad luck. “Even on status projects,” Wurster said with a laugh, “there’s no carte blanche in China.”

The hidden rules and restrictions are felt even more strongly by the vast majority of foreign architects who are not working on high-visibility projects. Consider Panesar. The financial crisis devastated his boutique firm in London in 2009, forcing him and his partner at Urban Hybrid Architecture to lay off most of their 15-person staff and take a gamble on China. Dapper and soft-spoken, Panesar, who is 35, has spent the past 18 months scrambling to get his foot in the door with all kinds of projects in Chengdu: train stations, kindergartens, residential developments. So far, he has pulled in enough design fees to keep his firm afloat. But he’s still waiting for one of the designs to actually be built. “China is not the blank canvas that you imagine,” Panesar said. “We’re just crawling really, but we’re here for the long haul.”

There was one expat missing that night at China Groove. Adam Mayer, now 29, left his job in Chengdu a few weeks earlier and flew back to California to figure out his next move. “I built up a great portfolio of designs,” Mayer told me when we talked by Skype. “But I started to wonder what good it served.” None of his designs were built. For all the creative freedom he enjoyed, Mayer began longing for stronger mentoring and more concrete results. In some cases, clients were using his work to impress officials in hopes of winning a bid or acquiring land for a future project. (In China, all land is owned by the state.) “I feel as though I was more in advertising or marketing than architecture,” he said.

Mayer’s experience is not universal. But many foreign architects in China sense that they are operating in the dark, toiling in a system they dimly understand. Real estate development in China is a murky business. There is little transparency — and lots of horse trading — in everything from the acquisition of land to the awarding of bids and competitions. In all but the highest-profile projects, foreigners are largely sidelined during the building process itself, which by law and tradition is controlled by local design institutes.

As foreign architects continue to arrive, there is also increasing competition for jobs and business. Some international firms have even started lowballing bids to try to buy their way into the market — a development that is “killing Western firms here,” says the Shanghai-based Dutch architect Daan Roggeveen, who is the co-author of a book on China’s new megacities. In the meantime, Chinese and foreign firms alike are moving to localize their staffs — both to cut costs and to cultivate a new generation of Chinese architects, many of whom have trained abroad.

“I’ll definitely go back to China,” Mayer said. For now, though, he is too busy cramming for the exams that will allow him, at last, to call himself an architect in the United States.

A few miles from the wood-sculpture museum near Harbin, a far bigger cultural landmark is rising on the banks of the frozen Songhua River. When it is finished, the Harbin Cultural Island — the MAD-designed opera house and performance center I saw modeled in the office — will look like a trio of snow-swirled mountains. Gillen was checking on the progress. “Three years ago,” he admitted, “I’d never even heard of Harbin.”

As we clambered to the top of this construction site — those heights again — it somehow made sense that Gillen’s planned year in China had extended to almost three. In his previous job at a New York firm, he said, “I spent a year and a half doing concept designs that never got built.” When I asked him how long his China sojourn might last, he smiled: “How’s the New York real estate market doing?” As the winter sun hung over the horizon, Gillen walked around the half-completed opera house — “a baby being born,” he called it — and added: “I’m in a lucky position. I don’t know if the pace of growth in China is sustainable, but I’ll ride it as long as I can.”

The Millennials Check In

 

By JANET MORRISSEY

Published: March 12, 2012

The hotel industry, struggling to recover from the depths of the recession, has begun to contemplate a group of travelers it sees as crucial to its economic growth — those in their 20s to mid-30s who are obsessed with technology, social media and design.

Casey Kelbaugh for The New York Times

The music of Luke Rathborne at the Ace Hotel in Manhattan does not prevent some from going online.

Many hotel owners and operators are remodeling existing hotels or introducing new ones that offer free hotelwide Wi-Fi connections; large, welcoming lobbies with plush, comfortable furnishings; state-of-the-art fitness areas; in-room power consoles to plug in iPads, laptops and other devices; and stylish bars that spill into the lobby.

Some are also scheduling nightly social events, like happy hours and free wine tastings, aimed at luring the iPhone-toting generation to their hotels.

Older travelers, on the other hand, often prefer solitude at the end of the day. They “like the face-to-face interaction during the day, but at the end of the day, we’re done — bring us our room service and leave us alone,” said David Loeb, a senior research analyst at Robert W. Baird & Company, a wealth management firm.

Younger travelers also tend to visit three or four different restaurants and bars a night, so some hotels are opening up multiple bars and lounges with different themes at different times of the day to keep them in the hotel. Many also offer free daily events, including tea tastings, yoga sessions and wine tastings, said Raj Chandnani, vice president for strategy at WATG, an architectural design firm for the lodging industry.

The hotelier Ian Schrager, a founder of the Studio 54 nightclub, was a pioneer in creating designer hotels with hip nightclubs, like the Paramount, Royalton and Hudson hotels in Manhattan in the 1980s and ’90s.

Starwood followed with its W hotels in the late 1990s and the debut of its Aloft brand in 2005. Other major brands have since jumped in, among them the InterContinental Hotels Group’s Indigo brand, Hyatt Hotels Corporation’s Andaz and Hyatt Place brands, and Marriott International’s concept to turn its lobbies into so-called great rooms.

Gerard Greene, a former hotel analyst, said he felt so strongly about the need for designer hotels at affordable prices that he quit his job, sold his home in London and used cash from the sale to finance his dream.

Now, 10 years later, his brand, Yotel, has four hotels, including one in Midtown Manhattan that some guests have described as futuristic. That hotel has an airportlike check-in kiosk (there is no registration desk); social public spaces; Wi-Fi access, power consoles and entertainment systems that devices can plug into; giant Monsoon shower heads; and compact 200-square-foot rooms, which were inspired by airline cabins, that have floor-to-ceiling windows.

Yotel’s other hotels are at the Gatwick and Heathrow airports in London and at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam, and it is planning on new ones in Miami, San Francisco, Paris, Hong Kong and New York, at Kennedy Airport.

But could all of this be a passing fad that will fade as the travelers get older?

Mr. Greene said he was not concerned, comparing it with the Apple phenomenon.

“Younger people were the first to adopt the iPods, iPads and so forth, and now my mom has an iPhone, as do much older people,” he said. “But the people who got it first were the younger people.”

Similarly, he said he believed that older travelers would follow the young in hotel trends.

“My sense is most people think there’s been a change,” said John Fox, a senior vice president at PKF Consulting, “and it’s a permanent change.”

“All of the major brands — Hilton, Starwood, Marriott, InterContinental — have developed hip products that are targeted at the younger traveler,” said Chris Klauda, a vice president at D. K. Shifflet & Associates, a travel and hospitality market research company.

Travel spending by these younger travelers rose 20 percent in 2010, making them the fastest-growing age segment, according to American Express Business Insights, though they still lag the baby boom generation in overall spending.

Hotels that ignore these younger travelers, said Mark Woodworth, president of Colliers PKF Hospitality Research, will be at “a very severe competitive disadvantage.”

About a decade ago, the hotel industry was concentrating much of its effort on luring people who are now mostly in their 50s and 60s. The changes involved higher-quality beds, brighter lighting and bigger work spaces. And those travelers were loyal to brands that offered reliable, comfortable services.

Today, the Millennials, or Generation Y, seem to be seeking the opposite: the innovative and the off-the-wall attract their attention and their wallets.

“Interesting is more important than comfort,” said Bjorn Hanson, divisional dean of the Preston Robert Tisch Center for Hospitality, Tourism and Sports Management at New York University. “It’s the reverse for baby boomers.”

Mr. Hanson said wall-to-wall — and free — Wi-Fi service was not only demanded but expected. “High-speed Internet is almost like air to Millennials,” he added, with most considering it as essential as beds and towels.

Hotel owners are also installing power consoles in rooms and public areas so that charging all those cellphones and laptops is easy and accessible.

“Gen Y’ers don’t want to have to unplug lamps or crawl under the bed to get their laptops and P.D.A.’s plugged in,” Ms. Klauda said.

The Plaza Hotel in New York has gone one step further, placing iPads in every hotel room. Guests can use the device to control the lighting, adjust the air-conditioning, order room service and read the morning paper.

Marketing and communicating through social networks are also important among hoteliers. When young travelers have a problem at a hotel, they are less inclined to complain to the hotel manager, as their predecessors generally do; they go online and post on Twitter about it. In early 2010, Starwood Hotels and Resorts Worldwide responded by setting up a team of about 20 people whose sole job is to monitor and respond to online complaints and comments.

Probably the biggest physical change has been to the hotels’ lobbies. Executives are retrofitting lobbies with comfortable sofas and Art Deco furnishings.

“If Millennials are wearing shorts, a T-shirt, a baseball cap and athletic shoes, a lobby that has mahogany paneling, English hunting scenes and Oriental rugs doesn’t connect as well,” Mr. Hanson said.

Young travelers also tend to spend far more time socializing and working in the lobby than they spend in their hotel rooms. “We coined the phrase ‘isolated togetherness,’ because if you watch them in the lobby, a lot of them are texting — but they’re texting each other in the lobby,” Ms. Klauda said.

Reopening a Mies Modernist Landmark

By ALICE RAWSTHORN

Published: February 24, 2012

LONDON — What would you do if the very grand, rather imperious architect who had designed your house invited himself for a visit? Doubtless, you would want the house to look its best, especially if its design was so radical that it had caused a critical storm.

David Zidlicky

Villa Tugendhat, designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, on a hill overlooking Brno, Czech Republic.

The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in 1933 with Lilly Reich, with whom he designed the interior of Villa Tugendhat.

Even so, Fritz and Grete Tugendhat’s response to the news that Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was coming to Villa Tugendhat, the house he had built for them and their three children in the Czech city of Brno during the late 1920s, was rather extreme. They were so worried that he would object to the presence of Grete’s shabby old piano in the room he had furnished for the children’s nanny that they decided to hide it in the basement. Thankfully there was no need, because the visit was canceled.

Luckily for Mies, his detractors knew nothing of the piano saga. The gist of their criticism was that his design was undeniably beautiful, but too imposing to live in, at least, not comfortably. “Can one live in Villa Tugendhat?” was the title of a 1931 essay in Die Form magazine. The Tugendhats argued that one could, but they were wonderfully accommodating clients who had told Mies precisely what they needed from their home, then given him carte blanche and a seemingly limitless budget to build it.

The result is among Mies’s finest works and was hailed as a new model of 20th-century living, at least for those who were as sophisticated and privileged as the Tugendhats, both of whom came from wealthy Jewish industrial families. They moved into the house in 1930, but abandoned it eight years later to flee Czechoslovakia before the threatened Nazi invasion. Villa Tugendhat has now been restored, and is to open to the public on March 6, when visitors will discover that, innovative though it is in style and structure, the house is deeply traditional in other respects.

“Mies took radical decisions about how to design a new kind of living space, and the house is incredibly spacious, incredibly luxurious and incredibly sensual,” said Barry Bergdoll, chief curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. “But the Tugendhats had very specific notions about how they wanted to live. If you look at the program, it is almost like a 19th-century description of an English country house with a room for the butler to iron the morning newspaper. The space seems open and flowing, but there are large zones of privacy for the behind-the-scenes world of the servants.”

Villa Tugendhat is a product of what Mr. Bergdoll calls “the miracle period” of Mies’s prewar career in late 1920s Germany when it was one of a series of commissions he undertook, together with the Barcelona Pavilion or, as it was officially called, the German Pavilion at the 1929 International Exposition in Barcelona. Grete Tugendhat had visited one of his houses when living in Germany with her first husband. After her divorce, she married Fritz Tugendhat, and they invited Mies, then in his early 40s, to design their home on a site with magnificent views of medieval Brno.

The result was a steel-framed structure in which Mies addressed his clients’ desire for privacy by locating their bedrooms on the upper floor, and most of the services, including Fritz’s photographic studio, on the lower floor. Between those floors is the public space, a sumptuous open-plan room looking out over the garden and across the fields to Brno through an immense glass wall. It is divided into different areas by velvet curtains and an onyx-clad screen, whose colors change with the light throughout the day.

Working with the interior designer Lilly Reich, Mies specified all of the furniture and furnishings in opulent woods, stones, velvets, silks and leathers. A new chair, the Brno, was designed especially for the house, with white sheepskin upholstery and a flat steel base. Mies insisted that there should only be one work of art in the living space, a 1913 sculpture of a woman’s torso by the German artist Wilhelm Lehmbruck.

The Country Just Over the Fence

  By PAUL THEROUX

Published: February 23, 2012

A SIMPLE painted sign on a wooden board — “To Mexico” — was propped near the door in the fence, but it was the fence itself that fascinated me. Some masterpieces are unintentional, the result of a freakish accident or an explosive act of sheer weirdness, and the fence that divides Nogales, Ariz., from Nogales, Mexico, is one of them.

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Nogales, Ariz., and Nogales, Mexico

In a lifetime of crossing borders I find this pitiless fence the oddest frontier I have ever seen — more formal than the Berlin Wall, more brutal than the Great Wall of China, yet in its way just as much an example of the same folie de grandeur. Built just six months ago, this towering, seemingly endless row of vertical steel beams is so amazing in its conceit you either want to see more of it, or else run in the opposite direction — just the sort of conflicting emotions many people feel when confronted with a peculiar piece of art.

You can, of course, also go through it, which is what I wanted to do. And there was the entryway, just past J. C. Penney and Kory’s clothing shop — a door in the wall at the end of hot, sunlit Morley Avenue.

After leaving my car at a secure parking lot ($4 a day), I showed my passport to the United States border guard, who asked about my plans. Business?

“Just curiosity,” I said. When he made a disapproving squint, I added, “Don’t you go over now and then?”

“Never been there,” he said.

“It’s 10 feet away!”

“I’m staying here,” he said, his squint now suggesting that I should be doing the same.

I pushed the turnstile and stepped through the narrow door — no line, no other formalities — into the state of Sonora, Mexico, where I was instantly, unmistakably in a foreign land. The roads were bumpier, the buildings vaguely distressed; I was breathing in the mingled aromas of bakeries, taco stands and risen dust.

Glancing back a moment later, I could not see Arizona anymore, only the foreground of Mexico — small children kicking a ball, men in sombreros conferring under a striped awning, steaming food carts.

I TREASURE border crossings, and the best of them are the ones where I’ve had to walk from one country to another, savoring the equality of being a pedestrian, stepping over the theoretical line that is shown on maps, from Cambodia into Vietnam, from Pakistan into India, from Turkey into the Republic of Georgia. Usually a frontier is a river — the Mekong, the Rio Grande, the Zambezi; or a mountain range — the Pyrenees, the Rwenzoris. It can also be a sudden alteration in topography, a bewildering landscape transformation — hilly Vermont flattening into Quebec. But just as often a border is a political expedient — irrational yet unremarkable — creating a seamless no man’s land, just a width of earth, bounded by fences.

I am nattering on about this border fence, partly because it is a visual marvel, something like a stockade, and also because, as the guard demonstrated, it calls for a decision. Do you go through, or stay home? It used to be a more casual proposition. Nogalans remember when it was a modest enclosure known as la linea, the line, when the main street between the two towns was more or less contiguous.

“We had a parade every spring,” Nicolas Demetrio Kyriakis told me. Nicolas, from an entrepreneurial family of Greek immigrants to Mexico, is a regidor, a Nogales town counselor and one of the advisors to Nogales’s mayor. “Floats went down the street and into Nogales, Arizona. A coronation was held on a platform on la linea, and the Fiesta de Mayo Queen was crowned. Both towns celebrated.”

That was 30 years ago. Back then Nogales, Mexico, was still a destination for servicemen from big, busy Fort Huachuca, a United States Army post about 25 miles as the crow flies to the northeast. Visitors from Tucson and beyond would pop over for a break from the routine, an opportunity to buy clay pots, sombreros, drink a world-class margarita, and visit a taqueria or sample local food. In the 1940s, cowboy films were made in the area. Hollywood actors crossed the border to eat and raise mild hell in La Caverna, a well-known club run by Nicolas’s cousins.

Such was the bond of the two border towns that when the old elegant Hotel Olivia on the Mexican side caught fire in the 1960s, and the situation became desperate, water hoses were tossed over the fence by the fire brigade in Arizona to help the local bomberos put it out, an act of neighborliness that is still fondly remembered by the Nogalans.

But everyone I spoke to agreed that conditions have changed. They said that when soldiers from Huachuca stopped visiting after 9/11 and guards started asking to see passports, the influx of visitors slowed to a trickle. And there was another theme: since the emphasis across America was on scrutinizing aliens, why would anyone wish to become an alien oneself? The repeated news stories of cartels taking over didn’t help: cross the Mexican border and risk dying like a dog.

“After the bombing of the World Trade Center, things went down,” Juan Cordero, the director of the Department of Economic Development in this part of Sonora, told me. “But it was massage parlors and bars on Canal Street, and curio shops downtown, an old-fashioned business model. Sure, we still had lots of American factories in our industrial area — thousands of people are employed there — but we have just a few tourists.”

And yet, here I was, a tourist, savoring the satisfaction of having eased myself into another country to enjoy the difference, with the tourist’s presumption that I deserved a good time. And I had the instant gringo’s assurance that my country, and my car, were just behind the tall fence at the frontera.

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Nogales, Ariz., and Nogales, Mexico

So what can you do with a couple of days in Nogales? Take advantage of its nearness, first of all. Buy cowboy boots, or pots, or folk art. I came away with a hand-carved set of dominoes, some silver coins and cleaner, whiter teeth.

On my first day I had a margarita at the Salon Regis. I asked the bartender about events in town. He thought a moment, then said, “Super Bowl on Sunday.”

Dinner at La Roca, which is just minutes from the fence, was pleasurable for my being in the hands of the sort of knowledgeable dark-suited old waiters that have disappeared from most of the world’s restaurants. Many have worked at La Roca since it opened (its 40th anniversary was celebrated this year). These men were the stalwarts at the restaurant at my hotel too, the Hotel Fray Marcos. At La Roca I had tortilla soup and as an entrée a Mexican mélange of fresh shrimp from Guaymas on the Sonoran coast. Elsewhere in town, even the smaller places such as Leos or Zapatas offered plates of dried shredded beef known as mochomos and delicious tacos.

I found the Nogalans courtly and easy to meet, grateful to have a visitor to the point where one demonstration of neighborliness was an offer of a swig of bacanora, a drink made from agave and Sonora’s gift to the world of drinkable rocket fuel — stronger than tequila.

It is obvious from the empty streets of downtown Nogales that very few visitors stay the night, but I found that overnighting simplified my experience of the place. The Hotel Fray Marcos has mixed reviews but I found it excellent (my suite went for around $80). It was also conveniently near the office of Dr. Jose Saturno, who on successive days worked on my teeth — the full limpieza ($54) y blanquiamento ($250).

There have always been inexpensive dentists in Nogales, but the combination of rising health costs in the United States (and the fact that many retiree health plans don’t include dental) along with the availability of cheap real estate in Nogales has created a dentistry boom here, which is expanding to include spa and other services as well.

At Laser Tech over on Obregon Street, Dr. Francisco Vazquez enlarged his dental practice a year ago to include a dermatology unit, and his wife (and mother of three), Martha Gonzales, opened a spa with treatments that included not only massage and steam baths but also “ancient rituals” inspired by the Aztecs, and for good measure hired Dr. Angel Minjares, whose specialties are theology and psychology, for “assessments.”

Their businesses are among the approximately 60 dental “wellness” practices here, mainly concentrated in a three-block area all within easy walking distance from the border gate. Most of the patients are American retirees nipping over for the day from Tucson or nearby Green Valley.

Gerd Roehrig, an older Tucson resident originally from Germany, was seeing Dr. Ernesto Quiroga about an implant. What would have cost him $4,500 in his hometown of Tucson, he said, was about a third of that in Nogales. Creating a further enticement, Dr. Quiroga recently invested $150,000 in a 3-D scanning machine for CAT scans.

“I guess Canal Street could now be called Root Canal Street,” I said to Juan Cordero, after my treatment.

He sighed. “People are worried, “ he said. “They think Nogales is dangerous. You know the expression poner salsa a los tacos?”

Slather sauce on the tacos — exaggerate.

To try to get a handle on just how dangerous my visit was, I asked to meet the Secretary for Public Safety in Sonora and was introduced to Ernesto Munro Palacio, a 6-foot-3 businessman and former pitcher for the Monterrey Sultans, who, since 2009, has been responsible for security in the state.

“Prior to [2009] there was very little investment in security,” he said. “But within the past two years Sonora had invested $100 million in helicopters, armored cars and surveillance planes, to find the landing strips of organized crime and the marijuana farms.”

Murders are a problem all over Mexico, and they have devastated cities like Ciudad Juárez, which is a cartel battleground. But Secretary Munro said that in Nogales the murder rate has declined from 210 in 2010 to 83 in 2011 and that they are almost exclusively drug related.

“Ask your people if they know the name of one American who’s been killed in Sonora,” he said. “No tourist has ever been killed in Nogales.”

The State Department said that in the two years from Jan. 1, 2010, to Dec. 31, 2011, there were 21 reported homicides of American citizens in Nogales and advises that visitors to Sonora travel on main roads and only during daylight hours. Meanwhile, the Arizona governor, Jan Brewer, who earlier this month said that she should be an “ambassador for Sonora,” enthusiastically promotes tourism in the area. I heard even more robust testimonials about Sonora, and Nogales in particular, from the Americans I met seeking dental care, who remarked on the hospitality of the city.

The Bianchis, a retired couple from Tucson I met in a waiting room, were content. “We come here all the time,” Mr. Bianchi said. “I got bridgework. And, hey, people are nice.”

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Nogales, Ariz., and Nogales, Mexico

Nogales is a border town trying to save itself, and I think succeeding. I was struck, walking the city, by the distinct air of foreignness mingled with a pleasing ordinariness — children at play on school playgrounds, shoppers, churchgoers — the pleasures and routines of Mexico. The visible absence of travelers gives the city a greater feel of difference, as do the brightly painted houses that dot hillsides, the result of a scheme by the Nogales mayor, José Ángel Hernández Barajas, who created an Urban Image Department, which provides free paint for any who wish to spruce up their home. He has also created schools and sports programs, as well as teams of street cleaners.

The streets of Nogales are as tidy as any on the American side, and full of surprises. On my way to see the boomtown that lies beyond downtown and the dental clinics, I passed a two-story sculpture of a muscular naked youth spearing a winged reptilian figure sprawled at his feet. Officially known as “The Defeat of Ignorance” (“La Derrota de la Ignorancia”), the statue (designed by the Spanish sculptor Alfredo Just, in the late 1960s) is fondly referred to by Nogalans as mono bichi — “the naked guy” in a local phrase that is partly Yaqui. (Nogalans scatter their speech with Yaqui words that are incomprehensible elsewhere, like buki for child and yori blanco for white man.)

I was to discover that the neighborhoods just across the fence are not representative of the town at large, which is a lesson in how to know another country: stay longer, travel deeper, overcome timidity. Tourists usually stick close to the fence, which accounts for the density of curio shops, and now the density of dental practices. But that downtown of Nogales is misleading.

DRIVING a few miles south with Juan Cordero I saw how Nogales sprawled, with newly built and modern subdivisions near more modest ones, all comprising Nuevo Nogales. “This is the main economic engine driving Nogales,” Juan said. The majority of the 32,000 people employed in Nogales work in the Industrial Area in factories making cellphone components, semiconductors, air ducts for jumbo jets. Most of the names are familiar — Otis Elevator, Black & Decker, Chamberlain garage door openers, Rain Bird Sprinklers, General Electric, Watts Water Technologies, Flextronics, B/E Aerospace. Some companies like Kimberly-Clark and Motorola have been here since the late 1960s. The lives and working conditions of such employees are well described in William T. Vollmann’s “Imperial,” an exhaustive account of an area that encompasses California and Mexico, which in its complexity and conflict resembles the Nogales border.

These are skilled workers. Those without education or manufacturing skills, the so-called campesinos, look elsewhere for work, and often cross the border to find it. Many who end up in the United States without papers are caught, jailed for a period, and bused to the border. This, too, is a revelation from the other side of the high fence.

Nogales is where they are dumped. Peg Bowden, a retired nurse, brought me to El Comedor, a shelter run by American Jesuits near the Mariposa gate just about a mile west of downtown Nogales. Ms. Bowden told me she was so shocked by the savage attack on Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson in January 2011 that she decided to do something humane: “I needed to connect with something positive.” She joined a group of Samaritans — “a bunch of renegade senior citizens whose mission is to prevent deaths in the desert,” and she volunteered at El Comedor, working a few days a week, crossing the border from Arizona.

As a trained nurse she is useful, treating bullet wounds and severe hypothermia and the effects of starvation and exposure — common among border crossers. “Last week we had a girl who’d been lost in the desert for three days. She was 14.”

It was another day in Nogales, another revelation for me, and by far the most melancholy. In El Comedor, 160 lost souls, most of them adults, and four small children, were seated on benches, at communal tables, eating breakfast in an open-sided shelter at the side of the road.

Some had been longtime residents in the United States — Alejandro, a restaurant worker in North Carolina for 13 years, Arnulfo a carpenter for 11.

“I spent 20 years in Napa picking strawberries,” Maria, an older woman in a long black dress, told me. “My husband and children are there. I came to Mexico for my father’s funeral.” She was wearing her funeral dress. She couldn’t return to the United States, nor did she have a home in Mexico anymore.

They were soft-spoken, humbled and hopeless. A woman in her 20s, Rosalba, had spent four days in the desert. She had blistered feet, a deep wound from a cactus thorn and a severe infection. Some had been caught making their first crossing. Others had been sent home after years in the United States.

The saddest case to me was a woman from Oaxaca. Abandoned, with no money, no prospects and no hope of making a living in Oaxaca, she left her three children in the care of her mother and crossed the border with four other women, in the hope of finding work. Somehow separated from the other women, she was found in the desert.

“It’s like ‘Sophie’s Choice,’ ” Peg Bowden said.

She accepted her fate, but I will never forget the sight of her alone at the table, a plate of food before her, eyes tightly shut, hands together uplifted in prayer.

I was just a tourist. The fence, which I discovered is less than three miles long, had hidden all of this — the downtown, the factories, the restaurants, the residential subdivisions, the mall, the migrants, sad stories, happy stories.

It’s there for anyone to discover, and so simple. It was as illuminating to me as any foreign travel I have taken anywhere in the world. In some ways, being so near home and taking less effort, it seemed odder, freighted with greater significance, this wider world at the end of Morley Avenue, just behind the fence.

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London real estate coming off steroids

By George Hay

The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.

London real estate has been on steroids since 2009. But it’s no longer a racing certainty that the capital’s property will deliver an Olympic performance this year.

Properties in London’s fanciest districts like Chelsea and Notting Hill entered 2012 at record levels – about 10 percent above the last peak, says high-end real estate agent Savills. The recovery in London’s financial sector is one factor, with over 20 percent of Londoners’ overall income generated in finance. Meanwhile, international buyers continued to see London as an attractive place to live and a safe financial asset at a time of market volatility. Sterling’s weakness against the euro, relative to pre-crisis levels, only helps.

But one leg supporting the market is starting to tire. The capital’s financial sector is in decline. About 9 percent of the workforce was shed in 2011, says the Centre for Economics and Business Research. Bonuses have slumped.

Rents in London’s top areas are now coming off the boil, falling 0.2 percent in January to sit 0.6 percent below their peak in September, according to Knight Frank, another top-end agent. Corporate lettings budgets for relocating bankers to London have been slashed by up to 15 percent, it says.

The cull in the City isn’t over. And bloodletting has historically been accompanied by London price falls: in the early 1990s and 2008 crashes, prices dived 20 percent, says consultancy Capital Economics.

There are already signs of a slowdown in the sales market. Rightmove, a property website, says vendors in Kensington and Chelsea dropped asking prices by 1.7 percent in January, after a 0.4 percent snip in December. Asking prices in Islington, a nest for financial workers, were cut by some 4 percent in December, and 0.7 percent last month.

This all puts more pressure on international buyers if prices are to hold up or go higher. Their buying power has reduced somewhat as the euro has weakened against sterling since last summer. Moreover, as the sense of extreme crisis passes and equity markets recover, the appetite for safe havens may abate. But international buyers are an unpredictable force; demand from wealthy Russians remains keen.

Savills predicts a 3 percent rise in prime London real estate in 2012. But property tends to be momentum-driven. If prime rents and Kensington asking prices are leading indicators, the momentum will be down not up.

How About Gardening or Golfing at the Mall?

  By STEPHANIE CLIFFORD

Published: February 5, 2012

Cleveland’s Galleria at Erieview, like many malls across the country, is suffering. Closed on weekends because there are so few visitors, it is down to eight retail stores, eight food-court vendors and a couple of businesses like the local bar association.

David Maxwell for The New York Times

Gardens at the Galleria mall in Cleveland, which has branched out from standard retail fare in hopes of attracting visitors.

 

David Maxwell for The New York Times

Vicky Poole, director of marketing and special events at the Galleria in Cleveland, with a flat of recently sprouted kale.

So part of the glass-covered mall is being converted into a vegetable garden.

“I look at it as space, I don’t look at it as retail,” said Vicky Poole, a Galleria executive. “You can’t anymore.”

Malls, over the last 50 years, have gone from the community center in some cities to a relic of the way people once wanted to shop. While malls have faced problems in the past, the Internet is now pulling even more sales away from them. And as retailers crawl out of the worst recession since the advent of malls, many are realizing they are overbuilt and are closing locations at a fast clip.

The result is near-record vacancy rates at malls of all kinds, both the big enclosed ones and the sprawling strips. Sears Holdings is closing up to 120 stores, Gap Inc. 200 stores and Talbots 110. Abercrombie & Fitch closed 50 stores last year, Hot Topic, almost the same number. Chains that have filed for bankruptcy in recent years, like Blockbuster, Anchor Blue, Circuit City and Borders, have left hundreds of stores lying vacant in malls across the country.

Most cities, looking at shrinking budgets, cannot afford to subsidize or knock down ailing malls, and healthy retailers that are expanding — like H&M and Nordstrom Rack — generally will not open at depressed locations. So, as though they were upholstering polyester chairs from the 1960s with Martha Stewart fabric, urban planners and community activists are trying to spruce up and rethink the uses of many of the artifacts.

Schools, medical clinics, call centers, government offices and even churches are now standard tenants in malls. By hanging a curtain to hide the food court, the Galleria in Cleveland, which opened in 1987 with about 70 retailers and restaurants, rents space for weddings and other events. Other malls have added aquariums, casinos and car showrooms.

Designers in Buffalo have proposed stripping down a mall to its foundation and reinventing it as housing, while an aspiring architect in Detroit has proposed turning a mall’s parking lot there into a community farm. Columbus, Ohio, arguing that it was too expensive to maintain an empty mall on prime real estate, dismantled its City Center mall and replaced it with a park.

Even at many malls that continue to thrive, developers are redesigning them as town squares — adding elements like dog parks and putting greens, creating street grids that go through the malls, and restoring natural elements like creeks that were originally paved over.

“Basically they’re building the downtowns that the suburbs never had,” along with reworking abandoned urban malls for nonshopping uses, said Ellen Dunham-Jones, a professor at the College of Architecture at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

The efforts reflect a shift in how Americans want to shop today: rather than going to big, overwhelming malls, many prefer places where stores can be entered from the street, featuring restaurants, entertainment and other Main Street mainstays. Also, as commuters in urban areas shift to public transportation, the giant parking lots are no longer needed.

The Simon Property Group, a large mall operator, is remodeling 15 to 20 malls a year, said its chief operating officer, Richard Sokolov. It is adding amenities like electric-car charging stations and stadium-seating theaters, and scheduling 20,000 events a year, like cooking demonstrations. Malls today have to “provide a unique set of shopping, dining and entertainment experiences,” Mr. Sokolov said.

Westfield, another large operator, has added dog runs and ice rinks, and, in Toledo, Ohio, the Wait Room, a lounge where customers can drink a beer and check their e-mail “while their significant other shops,” said Katy Dickey, a Westfield spokeswoman, in an e-mail.

While some malls can afford to change with the times, many cannot, and over all, there are too many malls today, urban planners say. The vacancy rate at shopping centers and strip malls was 11 percent in the last quarter of 2011, the highest level since 1991, according to the research firm Reis. Larger regional malls fared better, with a vacancy rate of 9.2 percent.

There are about 108,000 shopping centers in America, according to a 2009 survey by the International Council of Shopping Centers. Just a few years ago, developers competed to build malls, betting that continued growth would support them, but the recession threw those plans off course.

A new enclosed mall has not opened in the United States since 2006, according to Professor Dunham-Jones, and many ambitious projects, like New Jersey’s Xanadu just west of Manhattan, have lain half-finished for years.

“In the aggregate, we have more than we need at this point, and it can have a blighting influence on communities,” said Patrick Phillips, chief executive of the Urban Land Institute. “You see that all over the country, these endless commercial strips that are completely underutilized.”

That is leading to a variety of creative solutions that “would help make ’60s and ’70s suburbia a bit more sustainable,” said Rob Shields, director of the City-Region Studies Center at the University of Alberta, which held a design competition over the last several months that attracted the Detroit and Buffalo proposals.

But putting the theory into practice is requiring unusual city-developer liaisons. Mall owners often need regulatory clearance or financing help from a city to make major changes, and cities can sometimes seize malls that they believe are a hindrance to economic development. And malls were usually built at busy intersections with good access to public transportation — a combination that still works, even if the mall itself doesn’t.

In Seattle, city planners are looking at reworking a still-thriving mall as a focus point for more development.

“We’re at this interesting moment, because in cities, land is very scarce,” said Marshall Foster, city planning director for Seattle, which is trying to make Northgate Mall, a popular mall built in 1950, a center for urban life. “We can’t afford to overlook these opportunities any longer.”

The city is adding transit and trying to increase jobs and living space there. It has restored a creek originally covered by a parking lot, and is pushing the mall owner and retailers to add a street-grid layout and remodel stores so they are accessible from the street.

Cleveland, too, has given over some plots of land to the greenhouse effort at the Galleria mall.

The shift to gardening began with the carts that used to sell jewelry or candles, where Ms. Poole, the director of marketing events, had herbs planted in the disused retail carts inside the mall. She learned how quickly aphids proliferate indoors (solution: release 1,500 ladybugs into the mall).

The garden now produces lettuce, strawberries, basil and other crops, which are sold to visitors and used for the mall’s catering business. An unexpected benefit has been an influx of visitors, which has prompted related retailers to open in the mall, like a company that sells rainwater collection barrels.

“This has been sustaining us throughout these hard years, but now we’re looking at the potential of turning things around,” said Ms. Poole while preparing kale and spinach seeds for spring planting.

In Atlanta, Housing Woes Reflect Nation’s Pain

 

By MOTOKO RICH

Published: January 31, 2012

MARIETTA, Ga. — Housing prices continue to fall nationwide, despite a few modest signs of improvement. But not all markets are equal.

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T. Lynne Pixley for The New York Times

Foreclosed homes, including one in Stockbridge, make up about a quarter of all sales in the Atlanta area.

Places like Miami and Phoenix — symbols of boom-time excesses and later the sites of fierce crashes — were not the weakest performers last year. That distinction goes to Atlanta.

A sprawling Southern metropolis, Atlanta has become one of the biggest laggards in the economic recovery. In November, prices of single-family homes were down close to 12 percent compared with a year earlier, the largest decline among major metropolitan areas, according to data released on Tuesday in the Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller Home Price Index. Home prices regionally are now below their levels of 2000, making Atlanta one of only four metro areas to have experienced such a slide. The price of entry-level housing in the area — the lowest tier of the market, valued at just under $96,600 — fell by close to a third last year.

Even though the national economy shows signs of strengthening, the beleaguered housing market remains a significant drag on the recovery. Across a group of 20 metropolitan areas measured by S.& P./Case-Shiller, prices of single-family homes were 3.7 percent lower in November compared with a year earlier, with average prices at their 2003 levels. Economists say prices are unlikely to hit a nadir until at least late spring.

Tom Porcelli, chief United States economist at RBC Capital Markets in New York, projects that average prices could slip by as much as 5 percent nationally this year because of the large amount of distressed properties for sale and a shortage of buyers. Although Mr. Porcelli describes a “generally better outlook on housing” than he has over the last few years, he added, “we still have a long way to go.”

Here in Marietta, a suburb north of downtown Atlanta, the decline has attracted bargain hunters like Andy Heller. One damp afternoon last month, Mr. Heller, a part-time investor, examined a four-bedroom, faded yellow house that had sold seven years ago for $208,000.

Last fall, after a foreclosure by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the house was put up for sale. The asking price was slashed by more than a third last month to $99,900. Mr. Heller, eyeing kitchen cupboards with missing doors and signs of leaks in the upstairs bathroom, figured he could lop $30,000 more off the price.

“I am concerned as a citizen,” he said. “And on the other side as an investor, I see the opportunity of a lifetime.”

The reasons for Atlanta’s housing woes are both representative of the nation’s troubles and special to this former boomtown, where housing appreciated handsomely, though not to the lofty heights of Las Vegas, Miami and New York.

Where the region once attracted thousands of prospective home buyers drawn by plentiful jobs and more affordable living, that influx has dwindled. Local unemployment, at 9.2 percent, is slightly higher than the national rate, in part because one in every four jobs lost was connected to real estate, a much higher rate than in the rest of the country. Those jobs have yet to return, while even people with work are having trouble qualifying for loans.

The region, plagued by mortgage fraud and developers who dotted the exurban landscape with large luxury homes that never sold, is inundated with foreclosed properties. In fact, Atlanta has the most government-owned foreclosed properties for sale of any large city, according to the Federal Reserve.

Nationwide, sales of existing homes have recently picked up, prompting some economists to suggest that the housing market is finally starting to repair itself. But the number of new homes sold fell to a record low in December, and many homeowners are stuck in houses that are worth far less than they owe on their mortgages.

Last week, the Federal Reserve described the housing sector as “depressed,” and in his State of the Union address President Obama unveiled a refinancing program for homeowners waiting “for the housing market to hit bottom.”

Atlanta has suffered greatly from a contracting pool of home buyers. The number of people moving from within the United States to Atlanta peaked at 100,000 in 2006 and plunged to just 17,000 by 2009, the latest census figures available.

“Most of the housing activity that we experienced in the past 10 years was people moving to Atlanta from other markets,” said Domonic Purviance, real estate market analyst for the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta.

“If you lose 80,000 people a year coming to your market,” Mr. Purviance added, “that’s the whole issue.”

The collapse of the housing market also put many prospective homeowners out of work.

From February 2008 to August 2011, Atlanta lost 60,000 jobs in construction and real estate, about 25 percent of job losses in the broader metropolitan area during that period. Across the nation, construction and real estate jobs were only 15 percent of total positions lost, according to an analysis of Labor Department data by IHS Global Insight.

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T. Lynne Pixley for The New York Times

Christine Bradley, a broker, showing Andy Heller a foreclosed home in Cobb County, Ga.

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Many homeowners forced into foreclosures or distressed sales are people whose livelihoods had depended on a robust housing market. That’s what happened to the owners of a three-bedroom house in Dacula, about 45 minutes northeast of downtown Atlanta.

The husband, a home remodeler, had not had steady work in three years and the family was struggling to keep up with their mortgage payments. The couple, who asked not to be named because they were embarrassed to tell their extended family, were on the verge of foreclosure last month. Then Matt Hermes, an agent with Keller Williams who drives a bright red Ford F-150 pickup bearing the license plate “BUYAHOM,” persuaded them to try to sell it and negotiate with their lender to take a loss.

The couple recently accepted an offer on the two-story brick home, which cost them $160,000 in 2002, for $119,000 and are planning to move into a rental.

Such distressed sales are putting pressure on traditional sellers to slash their prices, too. In an upscale subdivision nearby, Christina West waited four years before giving in to the reality of the housing downturn.

She and her husband bought a four-bedroom home on a manmade lake in 1999 for $374,000. They spent $100,000 installing a pool, a hot tub, a basement bar and home theater.

When her husband lost his job as a sales executive at a consumer products company in 2007, the couple moved into a house that Ms. West had inherited from her mother in St. Augustine, Fla. They put the Dacula house on the market for $599,900.

They rejected several offers that they considered lowballs. “Everybody kept saying ‘Oh, it’s a great house, it will sell,’ ” Ms. West recalled. A contract for $447,000 fell through when the buyer could not secure a loan. Last month, the couple signed a contract for $360,000, effectively erasing previous gains and their large investment in improvements.

Other owners have simply been forced to give up their homes. In the third quarter of last year, the most recent period for which figures are available, foreclosed homes represented 24 percent of all sales in Atlanta, compared with a national rate of 12 percent, according to RealtyTrac, a data provider. Georgia is one of 30 states where a lender can foreclose on a home without appearing before a judge, which suggests that many more homes may be at risk of foreclosure in states where proceedings require court approval.

On a recent tour of several homes, James H. Sinnott, a corporate lawyer who is trying to raise an investment fund for distressed properties in Atlanta, was struck by the sheer volume for sale at astonishingly low prices.

In a well-kept subdivision in Jonesboro, south of downtown Atlanta, teenagers and elderly couples strolled the wide streets. Mr. Sinnott inspected a three-bedroom brick home that had floor-to-ceiling mirrors in several rooms, garish chandeliers and a number of stripped-out basement walls that made him suspect it had been used as a brothel. The asking price was $69,900. In Norcross, a northern suburb, he looked at a sun-filled three-bedroom home up a steep driveway that had sold for $131,300 in 2003. Now, the lender was asking just $39,900.

The glut is likely to grow. According to RealtyTrac, Atlanta has a nearly 12-month supply of foreclosed homes, about 70 percent of which are sitting on the books of servicers and lenders, waiting to go on sale. The release of just a chunk of properties can push down prices. “You can’t get a bottom until you clear the backlog,” Mr. Sinnott said.

Mr. Sinnott, who is new to the investment market, is having trouble raising capital. But even an expert like Mr. Heller, who has bought more than 100 houses with a partner over the last 20 years and says he has never missed a mortgage payment, is frustrated by his difficulty securing loans.

Typically, he buys in middle-income neighborhoods and then signs tenants to rent-to-own contracts. If he had financing, he said, he would buy as many as 100 homes this year. “If I had a lot of cash I would be going ballistic right now,” he said.

US Home Prices Decline Again

 

By MOTOKO RICH

Published: January 31, 2012

The American market for single-family homes continued to wobble, with prices declining again in November, nearly six years after they began to fall, a private report showed on Tuesday.

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Rick Bowmer/Associated Press

Average home prices were back down to levels last seen in mid-2003, the Standard & Poor's Case-Shiller index showed. Above a home for sale in Portland, Ore., last November.

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The New York Times

 

Single-family house prices in a group of 20 metropolitan areas tracked by the Standard & Poor’s Case-Shiller composite index fell by close to 0.7 percent from October, and were down by 3.7 percent from November 2010, worse than the 3.4 percent annual decline seen in October.

Average home prices were back down to levels last seen in mid-2003, the index showed.

Housing has played a dominant role in the country’s economic sluggishness, as homeowners have struggled with foreclosures or mortgage burdens that far exceed the values of their homes. Hundreds of thousands of construction workers and other real estate-related employees have been thrown out of work and are still struggling to cobble together incomes.

The 28-county metropolitan Atlanta region continued to stand out as the worst performer in the index, with home prices tumbling close to 12 percent from the previous November. In addition to Atlanta, home prices in Las Vegas, Seattle and Tampa all hit new lows in November.

Of the 20 cities traced by the index, home prices fell in 19 in November; only Phoenix had higher prices from the month before. On an annual basis, only Detroit and Washington experienced price rises.

“Despite continued low interest rates and better real G.D.P. growth in the fourth quarter, home prices continue to fall,” David Blitzer, chairman of the index committee at Standard & Poor’s, said in a statement.

“The trend is down and there are few, if any, signs in the numbers that a turning point is close at hand.”

Since a peak in mid-2006, home prices tracked by the index have plunged by almost 33 percent.

Although economists believe the rate of declines in home prices may slow, they generally forecast further decreases this year. “The enormous supply overhang of existing homes (particularly factoring in all those in foreclosure or soon to be) promises to keep pressure on prices for some time,” Joshua Shapiro, chief United States economist at MFR Inc., wrote in an analysis of the Case-Shiller data.

Ipanema Has It All, Including Skyrocketing City Home Prices

By VINCENT BEVINS

Published: January 19, 2012

RIO DE JANEIRO — Ipanema. Across the world, the name of this Rio neighborhood conjures up images of beautiful residents, a laid-back tropical lifestyle and breathtaking natural surroundings. It is all of that.

But what is not as well known, or even evident when walking its quiet, sandy streets, is that the area has been at the forefront of an explosion in city house prices over the last few years, with the Zona Sul, or southern zone of Rio, turning into one of South America’s most exclusive communities.

“Let me give you an idea of what is happening here,” says Gisela Schenker Wajnberg, a lawyer and real estate agent based for decades in Ipanema. “We had an apartment sell two years ago for 2.7 million reals. It just went to a new buyer for 7 million reals,” or $3.76 million.

The property is not especially remarkable, either in quality or in price increase. Most prices in Ipanema and in Leblon, the similar but slightly more upscale stretch of beach neighborhood just to its west, have doubled or even tripled since 2009. They now average more than 15,000 reals per square meter, or $780 per square foot.

Those are eye-popping increases for many markets. But they are backed by a set of circumstances that have many analysts and industry executives saying they doubt that a real estate bubble is forming.

Brazil’s economy, and Rio’s in particular, has surged since 2008, despite the lingering global downturn.

After losing its status as Brazil’s political capital to Brasília in 1960 — and long trailing behind São Paulo, the country’s business capital — Rio struggled for decades to find a raison d’être that matched the size of the city’s image.

But now the metropolis is fulfilling a special place in the country’s boom. It is the base of Brazil’s efforts to develop its huge offshore oil reserves and will be a host city for the World Cup in 2014 and the host of the 2016 Summer Olympics.

There also is the proliferation of globally ranked hedge funds in the region, leading local newspapers to nickname Leblon as Brazil's “Wall Street” — not least because many repatriated financiers working at oceanside boutique operations are making more than they once did in New York.

For those determined to buy here, prices are being inflated further by the fact that there is simply not much space to go around. Ipanema proper is just nine by seven city blocks; Leblon is a bit smaller. And restrictive laws offer very little opportunity for development beyond modestly sized apartment blocks that mostly top out at about five stories.

“There is simply no supply to match the demand,” says Regina Mesquita, an agent at Sóimoveis Leblon. “Those that live here don’t want to leave, and there is no physical possibility for expansion.”

Copacabana, which lies just around the corner, and which has a nearly identical beach and architectural style, is a less expensive option. Although the neighborhood is still home to the Copacabana Palace, where visiting celebrities invariably stay, the area has lost much of its sheen and isn’t considered entirely safe for those conspicuously wealthy or foreign. But for those “a bit younger and livelier,” as Ms. Wajnberg puts it, prices in Copa average slightly more than 9,000 reals per square meter.

To its credit, Zona Sul — which includes Ipanema, Leblon and Copa — still feels like a laid-back beach village. Even in Leblon, upscale sushi spots lie down the street from vendors selling coconuts on street corners out of bright green rolling refrigerators. Offices of world-famous companies sit across from knife sharpening and key repair booths.

The region’s current offerings include a three-level penthouse apartment in Leblon, with a large veranda and private gym, for 28 million real, or a four-bedroom apartment with a swimming pool and a view of the Cristo Redentor statue for 22 million real in Copa.

Unsurprisingly, the price increases have led many to consider surrounding neighborhoods like Jardim Botânico, where old mansions line leafy streets tucked between Leblon, the Tijuca National Park and Lagoa, a picturesque lagoon not far from the ocean. Prices there average about 11,500 reals per square meter.

“I love Leblon, and I never thought of leaving,” says Tatiana Borges, an interior designer with A+T Arquitetura e Design, “but I had the opportunity to move into an actual house — which I wouldn’t have in Leblon, the prices for that are just crazy.”

Ms. Borges and her partner left their high-rise apartment with a panoramic view of the ocean and southern Rio for an large, older house in Jardim Botânico. “It’s not just more affordable,” she said, “It’s safe, bucolic and very charming.”

Two other recent actions should underpin doubts about a bubble, says Sergio Freire, chief executive at Brasil Brokers, one of Brazil’s largest brokerages, based in Rio.

The government has been invading and “pacifying” the favelas that stand quite close to all of these neighborhoods. Taking them back from drug gangs has increased long-term confidence in the nearby neighborhoods.

“Nobody wants to live near a favela, especially if it means you have violence nearby,” Mr. Freire said.

Perhaps even more important: Financing now is readily available to many Brazilians, especially on new-build projects. And just five years ago, Mr. Freire said, only 10 percent of the existing-home purchases handled by his company involved financing. Today, that number is more like 50 percent, he says.

“Brazil is not normal,” Mr. Freire said. “It’s the only country I know of where people buy their groceries with credit cards but buy their homes with cash. In the case of high-end properties on the secondary market, a lot of sellers simply don’t want to wait for buyers to find financing. They prefer cash, now.”

For the foreign buyer, the question is whether to take out a local mortgage and face some of the world's highest real interest rates — or take out a mortgage in their home country and be exposed to currency risk. HSBC, for example, charges 8.5 percent per year for homes costing 150,000 reals to 250,000 reals, on top of the 2 percent government charges.

Overseas Buyers in US: Foreclosure Auctions

By KEN BELSON

Published: January 14, 2012

PHOENIX — To the unknowing, the few dozen people milling around the picnic tables in front of the Maricopa County courthouse here every day could be jurors on break or scofflaws finally coming to pay a ticket. They tug on cigarettes, sip from big cups of coffee and fidget with their cellphones, often speaking in whispers.

Joshua Lott for The New York Times

Bidders need a $10,000 certified check and quick response times.

Joshua Lott for The New York Times

Bidders on foreclosed properties in Phoenix work for investors who, increasingly, live in Canada, China and other countries.

Joshua Lott for The New York Times

Most of the bidders and auctioneers are men in their 20s and 30s.

But instead of waiting to meet a judge, they are preparing to bid on the hundreds of foreclosed properties auctioned each week in one of the country’s more colorful public clearinghouses. During the housing boom, when mortgages were being given out with no money down and prices soared, the auctions were a sleepy sideshow. But in the years since, the auctions have grown into a scruffy economic circus where bargain hunters from around the world have scooped up houses often sold for less than half of the value of the mortgage.

The auctions look more like a low-end poker game than the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. The bidders and auctioneers, most of them men in their 20s and 30s, are on a clubby first-name basis, and their banter can border on sophomoric. But their trading serves a critical if somewhat heartless function: to find new buyers for houses so they can be fixed up and sold to more stable owners.

“This is capitalism at its rawest,” said Brad Grannis, a bidder from AZ Property Advisors. “There’s an asset, and people assign a value to it.”

In recent months, the auctions have become more competitive because of an influx of outsiders who are eager for cut-rate houses that they can resell or rent out and because of a decrease in the number of houses available. There were 2,296 trustee sales in Maricopa County last month, 44 percent fewer than in December two years ago during the depths of the market crash, according to The Cromford Report, a real estate newsletter.

Many economists say that the housing market has a long way to go before it returns to health and that the decline in foreclosures is partly because lenders, often under political pressure, are trying to work with distressed borrowers.

But optimists in Phoenix point to the decline as a harbinger of an upturn, albeit a tentative one.

“We went lower than anywhere except Las Vegas, and we got through the foreclosure crisis faster,” said Mike Orr, a researcher at the W. P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University and the editor of The Cromford Report. “I don’t know if this will be a significant recovery, but even going up a few points is still a recovery.”

The courthouse auctions have a bloodlessness that belies their impact on people’s lives. Every day, in the rain, morning chill or scorching heat, a half-dozen auctioneers set up shop on the picnic tables in front of the courthouse. They flip open their laptops and read off the addresses of the properties for sale, the value of each mortgage, the taxes due and the opening bid, which the seller determines. Homeowners’ names are never mentioned.

The bidders, many wearing jeans, hoodies and the occasional nose ring, work for investors who rarely attend the actual bidding. Increasingly, those investors come from Canada, China and other countries where Arizona property looks like a bargain. Local investors say these newcomers, as well as hedge funds, have driven up prices and made it harder to turn a profit.

The bidders register with each auctioneer and must produce a $10,000 certified check. They consult their spreadsheets on clipboards or iPads, which list the homes for sale. Many wear earpieces connected to cellphones so they can instantly relay the prices during the auction to their bosses, who know the limit of their clients.

“There’s no emotion in the bidding,” said Mary Nicholes, who runs the Home Ownership Center of Arizona, which bids on behalf of investors who want to rent out their homes. “They all have their number.”

The bidding moves quickly, but there are no secret signals and bidders rarely make eye contact. The regulars help one another, and they will also cheer or encourage colleagues as if they were investing their own money. “You got a hole in one!” one bidder yelled to another who had just bought a house with virtually no bidding. Bidding companies are typically paid a flat fee of about $2,500 or 3 percent of the purchase price, with a share of that money going to the bidder.

No rules are posted, but the bidders obey a strict code, the cardinal rule of which is that those who fail to pay their bills can no longer bid. One former bidder earned the nickname Runaway Bride after she won an auction for the wrong house, panicked and fled the scene without paying her $10,000 deposit.

Individual bidders show up, too. Christopher St. John, a longtime broker in Phoenix, recently went to bid on a house that was near another one that he bought and resold last year, making a $16,000 profit. Bidding at the auction started at $119,700 and zoomed past Mr. St. John’s limit of $125,000. The auctioneer, in chinos, a golf shirt and a Diamondbacks baseball cap, eventually sold the house for $158,000.

Mr. St. John thought the house was worth no more than $175,000, and because he would have to pay about $15,000 to fix it and cover any fees and taxes, bidding that high did not make sense to him. But to well-heeled investors, a smaller profit was acceptable, he said.

“It’s amazing how different it is now and how many more people there are,” he said. “It’s a battle to get properties.”

At times, the auctioneers and bidders are confronted with the reality of what they are trading. Some homeowners come to see their houses sold and vent their anger. A few bring video cameras to film the auction, trying to intimidate the bidders. Every so often a homeowner, having walked away from the mortgage, will bid on his own house. In recent weeks, protesters from the Occupy Phoenix movement camped in the park across the street have stopped by to appeal for an end to the auctions.

For some bidders, the intrusion is another reminder of the hardship that they themselves are enduring. This month, Kelly Galles started working as a bidder after a bout with cancer forced her to give up her job teaching preschool. Her husband, who worked in construction until the downturn, is one of the auctioneers. Lured to Arizona from California during good times, they bought a house that is now worth less than what they owe on it.

“It’s a pretty exciting job,” she said. “The downside is these are people’s homes. We’re lucky not to be here ourselves.”

Hotel Trends: Tending to the Loyalists

By JULIE WEED

Published: January 2, 2012

With airplanes flying so full these days, it’s not easy to find a seat using frequent flier miles. But hotel loyalty programs are a different story.

Paul J. Bereswill/AP Images for SPG

At the Open in September, the tennis pro James Blake, right, gave lessons to select Starwood guests.

Hotel programs generally do not have blackout dates, do not charge travelers to book a reward stay and do not assess a fee if customers’ plans change and they need to rebook the room.

But hotel chains have more inventory than airlines because their occupancy rate is usually lower than an air carrier’s. Customers who redeem points for a free stay “aren’t usually taking a room away from a paying customer, the way an airline traveler redeeming a free seat might be,” said Brian Kelly, who manages a travel blog called The Points Guy.

Hotel rewards programs are not all alike, however. Some erase points if an account shows no activity in a year, while other programs’ points never expire.

Customers in the Hilton HHonors program, for example, need to fulfill annual qualification requirements or they may be downgraded to a lower rewards tier. The points remain active as long as the program member stays in a Hilton Worldwide hotel, or earns or redeems any HHonors points within a 12-month period. Otherwise, they expire. “We want to focus more on the people who are still engaged with us,” said Jeff Diskin, senior vice president for global customer marketing at Hilton Worldwide. “We are stratifying who we invest in.”

In the Starwood Preferred Guest program, which includes the W, Westin, Sheraton and St. Regis chains, customers at the basic level also have their accounts closed and points forfeited if they have no activity in their account in a year. E-mails to rewards program members suggest ways to keep the account open short of a hotel stay, like dining at a hotel in the chain or spending $12.50 to buy 1,000 Starpoints.

At the elite levels, the program is more forgiving, particularly for the highest tier, Platinum. “Each year a member is inactive, they are placed in a lower level so you can go years at the Platinum status without any activity before an account is closed,” said Chris Holdren, senior vice president for Starwood Preferred Guest.

Hyatt Hotels also closes accounts and erases points after 12 months. The Marriott Rewards policy says the company reserves the right to close accounts after two years of inactivity, but a spokeswoman, Laurie Goldstein, said, “So far, we have never done it.”

Michael McCall, the chairman of the marketing and law department at Ithaca College’s School of Business, pointed out that guests redeeming points for a free stay cost the hotel money, so promises of future free stays can take away from future profits.

Still, demoting customers who stay infrequently or canceling their points can be dicey, Mr. McCall said. “It saves money, but can engender ill will.”

Clay Voorhees, a marketing professor at the Eli Broad College of Business at Michigan State University, says hotels must focus on top customers because they are the most profitable. “Someone who only stays a few nights per year but just explodes money on conference facilities and meals is more valuable to the hotel than a value seeker who stays more often, but always at a discount,” he said.

Hotels are offering more choices to customers in redeeming their points. Frequent travelers who already spend many nights on the road may not value a free night in a hotel. They can choose instead to participate in hotel-sponsored events. The Fairmont offers a visit to a Zulu village in South Africa, where guests are accompanied by a photographer and served a traditional meal. At the W hotel in Hong Kong last October, Starwood Preferred Guest members could redeem points for a private concert with a pop star, Khalil Fong. Hilton and others allow members to buy merchandise, combine with airline miles or donate points to charity.

Those on the lower rungs of hotel rewards systems can inexpensively reset the expiration clock, Mr. Kelly, the blogger, said. He pointed to free mileage management services like Usingmiles.com and Awardwallet.com that will notify the user when points are due to expire. “Letting points expire is like putting money in a trash can,” he said.

Points never expire for members of the Priority Club, which is run by the InterContinental Hotels Group and includes Holiday Inn, InterContinental Hotels and Crowne Plaza. Don Berg, vice president for loyalty programs and partnerships at IHG, said his company’s program was created in 1983, and 50,000 original customers were still in the program, even though “there were periods of time along the way when we didn’t see some of them for a while.”

“Our research tells us the No. 1 feature of a rewards system is no point expiration,” Mr. Berg said. “It would be like looking at your checking account one day and seeing your money is all gone.”

Mr. Berg said there sometimes was a natural ebb and flow in travel habits. Customers cycle in and out of jobs that require heavy travel, he said, or may have circumstances like the birth of a baby or a family illness that dictate the amount of time they can spend away from home. “If you are sick, and we don’t see you for a year, we’re not going to cut you off,” he said.

There are a number of ways to compare hotel rewards programs other than how quickly points expire. Travelers can compare the number of points they receive for each dollar spent, as well as how many points they need to earn a free night at a luxury property. They can also see the point total to qualify for elite status, which offers benefits like free room upgrades and late checkout.

And then there are the hotels that eschew points-based reward systems. At the Kimpton hotel chain, seven stays earn customers a free room night. Staying at 10 different hotels earns two nights. “We wanted to encourage travelers to try different Kimpton hotels, perhaps in the same city,” said Niki Leondakis, president of Kimpton Hotels. “We also wanted our free stays to be uncomplicated, so customers don’t have to worry about acquiring different numbers of points for different stays or redeem different amounts of points to stay at different hotels.”

Mr. Kelly agreed that hotel rewards systems “can be complicated, confusing and annoying.” But, he added, “It’s worth investing time in figuring out how to earn and keep them.”

Miami Real Estate Market Embraces Brazilians

By NANCY BETH JACKSON

Published: December 29, 2011

MIAMI — In 2008 the real estate market in this “Gateway to Latin America” was in the dumps, with the hottest deals involving foreclosures. And the future looked as dark as many of the new beachfront luxury condo towers, where scores of buyers had forfeited sizable deposits and walked away from their deals.

“We had 70 years of product inventory out of the ground or ready to be built,” recalled Maurice Veissi, a local Realtor and president of the National Association of Realtors. “About a third who had contracts walked. Another third had to close but never built. It was basic supply and demand. The prices went down and down and down.”

But that was before the Brazilians became the latest wave of Latin Americans to hit Miami. They first flocked to spend holidays on the beach and then to buy vacation condos, sometimes more than one and mostly for cash.

The languishing real estate was “chewed up” in no time, says Mr. Veissi. Now developers are back, starting or restarting ambitious condo projects.

The Brazilians, of course, aren’t the only reason the local real estate market is looking up. South Florida has become what the Miami Herald labeled “the nation’s epicenter” for residential sales to foreigners, including other Latin Americans and Europeans. In Miami, foreigners account for more than 65 percent of all condo and home sales, according to the Miami Association of Realtors.

Brazilian buyers have steadily surpassed other nationalities. In November, Miami Association of Realtors statistics listed Brazilians as the second most active foreigners, at 12 percent of all buyers, sandwiched between Venezuelans (15 percent) and Argentines (11 percent). While observers expect Brazilians to take the lead next year, Brazilian ownership already is reportedly as high as 70 percent at some luxury towers.

“They are taking Miami by storm,” said Edgardo Defortuna, the Argentine-born founder and chief executive of Miami-based Fortune International Realty, which opened a satellite office in São Paulo last year. “More than just buying one apartment, they are also getting their friends and families to buy. When one buys in a project, the rest follow. They want to be around friends and people they know.”

Unlike earlier Latin American buyers, the Portuguese-speaking Brazilians aren’t fleeing political unrest or waiting out an economic downturn. They aren’t parking flight capital or bringing cash in suitcases. Typically, they are upper-middle-class families who want to enjoy their prosperity newly earned in Brazil as professionals and entrepreneurs.

Their country — geographically slightly larger than the continental United States — is on a roll, enjoying robust economic growth and preparing to host the World Cup in 2014 and the Summer Olympics in 2016. Despite concerns over a weakening Brazilian real, optimism is high.

“The Brazilians just come to spend money,” said Cristiano Piquet, a 34-year-old Brazilian who moved to Miami in 2001 to race cars. He now heads a real estate company with some 50 agents who market lifestyle as well as luxury condos averaging $750,000 to $1 million to a mostly Brazilian clientele. “Paradise exists and it’s Miami. Everything is half the price and everything works,” he said.

Plus, he added, Miami is clean, organized and, most of all, safe to flaunt signs of affluence like Rolex watches or Aston Martin convertibles without fear of street crime. One local vanity license plate, he said, telegraphs in Portuguese: “Here I can.”

Buyers come from Brazil’s wealthy states, like Minas Gerais and Rio Grande do Sul, as well as the major cities of Rio and São Paulo. And access is easy, with many nonstop flights (of about nine hours) offered to Miami from airports throughout the country.

Once in Miami, Brazilians favor high-end, waterfront, family-sized condos. And while they usually only pay short visits two or three times of year, they do not rent out the properties between trips, Mr. Piquet said, explaining, “Brazilians don’t want anyone else sleeping in their beds.”

Brazilians have bought heavily in top-end offerings like the 1,800-unit Icon Brickell on Biscayne Bay. That complex and several other upscale projects feature design packages by the Brazilian furniture manufacturer Artefacto, which maintains showrooms in two high-end malls here.

Miami has a history of boom and bust and boom again. No project tells the story better than the Icon Brickell, which broke ground in 2006 and had many units priced at more than $1 million. But only a handful were ready for closing two years ago when banks took over two of the project’s three towers.

In September, after aggressive international marketing by Fortune Realty, it was touted as the top-selling real estate project in Florida. By November, the last developer units were sold, 18 months ahead of the new marking schedule, with sales dominated by Latin Americans.

At Brickellhouse, Miami’s first new condo tower in recent years, 100 of the 374 units priced from $200,000 to $1.4 million sold in less than 60 days, with almost all the buyers coming from Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Peru and Venezuela. (Unlike most U.S. developers, Harvey Hernandez, the project’s Venezuelan-born developer, is requiring buyers to put down 90 percent of the purchase price before construction is completed, a financial model that is familiar to most Latin buyers.)

Steven Minor, an associate at VR Business Brokers of Coral Gables, Florida, and coordinator at the Web site negociosenflorida.com, said many of his Venezuelan clients buy homes in upscale neighborhoods but also invest in small businesses or a portfolio of moderately priced condos to provide income and to meet U.S. visa requirements as investors.

In an effort to stimulate the U.S. housing market, a bipartisan proposal has been introduced in the U.S. Senate that, under certain circumstances, would award three-year residential visas to foreigners who invest at least $500,000 in residential real estate. “If that happened, the housing problem in Florida would be solved,” Mr. Piquet declared. “We could expect sales of 10 times more.”

Other changes also may be ahead for the Miami market. Florida lawmakers are scheduled to debate “destination resort” legislation that would allow casino gambling at mega-complexes like the $4 billion Resorts World Miami, a Genting Group of Malaysia project planned on 30 acres, or 12 hectares, along Biscayne Bay. Designed for Asian, European and Latin American visitors, it is to include 1,000 condo units.

Hong Kong-based Swire Properties, active in Miami since the 1970s when it began developing the high-end condo towers on Brickell Key, recently relaunched Brickell CitiCentre, a project that had been canceled in 2008. Already being compared to Swire’s Pacific Place in Hong Kong, the $700-million shopping/multiuse development is now the largest planned development in the area and includes a condo component.

Can Asian residential buyers be far behind the developers, local real estate agents have begun to ask. While the numbers of Asian buyers are still small, Florida’s official tourism marketing organization has declared China “a region of interest,” noting that visitors from the mainland and Hong Kong increased 59 percent between 2009 and 2010.

A Gym at the Inn

By ABBY ELLIN

Published: October 31, 2011

Rochelle Jacobs has been working out at Exhale, the mind and body spa, two to three times a week for the last nine years. She says she is so dedicated to her gym that she picks her hotels based on their fitness offerings.

Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times

Rochelle Jacobs working out at Exhale Gramercy Gym at the Gansevoort Park Avenue in Manhattan.

“If I’m in a major city where I know there’s an Exhale, I try to stay at that hotel,” said Ms. Jacobs, 39, a beauty industry entrepreneur in Manhattan, who often travels for business. “Usually the hotel gym never looks the way it does on the Web site, but I know what to expect if I go to an Exhale location.”

Hotels know that there are many travelers like Ms. Jacobs for whom the gym is often the deciding factor. That can be especially true in a big city, where there are multiple options.

Bjorn Hanson, divisional dean at the Preston Robert Tisch Center for Hospitality, Tourism and Sports Management at New York University, estimated that about 8 percent of travelers picked a hotel based on its fitness offerings. While 8 percent may not sound like a lot, he said, “to a hotel brand, that’s a substantial potential market share.”

And though many hotels have perfectly good fitness centers, some hotels see a name-brand gym as a way to distinguish themselves. They have been pairing up with fitness brands like Core Performance, Exhale, DavidBartonGym and SoulCycle in the last few years to offer classes, workouts and nutritional consultations for guests. Other hotels have arrangements with sporting good companies like New Balance (Westin) and Adidas (Fairmont), which provide guests with gear to use during their stay.

“Hotels are looking for ways to differentiate themselves, and having a gym in a hotel that’s part of a chain is a way to do that,” said Taylor Hamilton, a senior researcher with IbisWorld, a market research firm. “It’s easy for partnerships, and it gives gyms the feel of a national gym in a national hotel.”

Both hotels and fitness companies say the relationship is a win-win. Gyms get the chance to increase their visibility and introduce themselves to potential consumers while saving money. “When you’re co-branding with a hotel company that already has the space, you’re not forking over tons of cash to be there,” said Brett Blumenthal, founder and editor of thehealthyroadwarrior.com, a Web site for health-conscious business travelers. “You’re getting the benefit of further exposure and higher brand recognition, but with less financial commitment.”

Hotels see the gyms as another source of revenue. Some hotels charge extra fees for gym use. The Gansevoort South Beach, for example, which is home to DavidBartonGym, charges guests $15 for a one-day pass. The Ritz-Carlton Boston Common charges $15 for its adjacent Sports Club/LA, which offers a basketball court, swimming pool and an array of fitness classes. That fee goes directly to the hotel and not the gym, said Smaiyra Million, chief executive of Millennium Partners Sports Club Management, which owns and operates the Sports Club/LA and Reebok Sports Club/NY.

Having a professional fitness organization operate the gym also eases any pressure on hotels to try to excel in an unfamiliar arena. As Ms. Million put it: “Some hotels try to operate the gym themselves, and they quickly realize that’s not their core competency. That’s when they say, ‘We need to go and get the experts.’ ”

Sheraton Hotels and Resorts turned to Core Performance, a fitness, nutrition and physical therapy company based in Phoenix, to design its gyms and workout routines. Core Performance also designed some menu items in the hotel’s restaurants. Hoyt Harper, global brand leader for Sheraton Hotels and Resorts, in White Plains, said Sheraton hoped to have the program in all 400 Sheraton hotels worldwide by the end of this year.

Exhale is also expanding its reach. So far, it operates in eight hotels in the United States, including the Fairmont Battery Wharf in Boston, which opened earlier this year, and the Gansevoort Park Avenue Hotel in New York, where opened last November. “Our database is very valuable to these hotel brands because we end up sharing the same customer,” said Julia Sutton, chief operating officer of Exhale Enterprises. All the hotels offer a full roster of Exhale-designed classes. And even with the $35 fee per class, “We have these Exhale brand loyalists who stay at the hotels because of the class,” she said.

Not everyone thinks these types of relationships are mutually beneficial. Scott Rosen, the chief operating officer of Equinox Fitness Clubs, in New York, said the company had no plans to join up with a hotel. “We have a membership model where residential and corporate members use our clubs frequently,” he said in an e-mail. “Being tethered to a hotel does not add anything to that experience.”

But gyms affiliated with hotels disagree. For nearly a decade, the Sports Club/LA has been next to the Ritz-Carlton Boston and Washington, and the Four Seasons Miami and San Francisco. “Having guests use our facilities is a great way to spread awareness of our club,” Ms. Million said. “Although guests tend to be from out of town, it’s likely there may be one of our clubs in their home city. It’s a synergy that exists between two luxury brands. Their guests are our members. Our members are their guests.”

Tony Wells, executive vice president and chief marketing officer of 24 Hour Fitness, with about 420 clubs nationwide, said he has had discussions with hotel chains about licensing his brand or partnering with them on their gym. And Robert J. Giardina, the president and chief executive of Town Sports International Holdings, Inc., which operates New York, Washington, Boston and Philadelphia Sports Clubs, said he was open to building gyms in hotels in its current markets. “Hotels have to have a good gym as an amenity because guests are demanding it,” he said.

Kathryn Gordon, a freelance book marketer in New York, is typical of the guests the hotels are trying to attract. She chose to stay at the Mondrian South Beach last winter primarily because SoulCycle, the popular indoor cycling studio, had opened a temporary club there from December 2010 to June of this year.

“If there were two fabulous hotels next to each other — and if one had a regular gym and but the other had a SoulCycle — I’d choose the hotel that had a SoulCycle,” said Ms. Gordon, 44, who paid $32 a session. “I get a 45-minute workout, my heart rate goes where it needs to go, I’m in a puddle of sweat, and then I can go sit at the hotel bar.”

Cuba to Allow Buying and Selling of Property, With Few Restrictions

By DAMIEN CAVE

Published: November 3, 2011

MEXICO CITY — Cuba announced a new property law Thursday that promises to allow citizens and permanent residents to buy and sell real estate — the most significant market-oriented change yet approved by the government of Raúl Castro, and one that will probably reshape Cuba’s cities and conceptions of class.

Multimedia

 The new rules go into effect on Nov. 10, according to Cuba’s state-run newspaper, and while some of the fine print is still being written, the law published on Thursday amounts to a major break from decades of socialist housing. For the first time since the early days of the revolution, buyers and sellers will be allowed to set home prices and move when they want. Transactions of various kinds, including sales, trades and gifts to relatives by Cubans who are emigrating, will no longer be subject to government approval, the new law says.

“To say that it’s huge is an understatement,” said Pedro Freyre, an expert in Cuban-American legal relations who teaches at Columbia Law School. “This is the foundation, this is how you build capitalism, by allowing the free trade of property.”

Cuban officials would disagree; they argue that they are carefully protecting socialism as they move toward economic reform, and the new law includes some provisions that seem aimed at controlling both speculation and the concentration of wealth. Owners will be limited to two homes (a residence and a vacation property) and financing must go through Cuba’s Central Bank, which will charge fees, which have not been determined. And a tax of 8 percent will be split by the buyer and seller.

Nonetheless, experts and Cuban residents — who have been expecting the law for months — say the law’s implications are likely to be far-reaching. In a country defined by limited change and pent-up demand for freedom of all kinds, they argue, the law will probably open a Pandora’s box of benefits and risks.

On one hand, billions of dollars in property assets that have been essentially unvalued or undervalued and locked in place for decades would be available for sale.

Economists on the island favoring economic liberalization have said the country’s other changes — making room for small businesses, and private agriculture — have been limited by lack of internal demand. Some experts say home sales could free up the capital needed to jumpstart the island’s economy. At the very least, they argue, it will probably lead to a boom in renovation.

“With a housing market, suddenly people have some wealth and that’s a stake in the economy that generates activity,” said Ted Henken, a professor at Baruch College in New York.

Yet on the other hand, there are also significant social concerns. Mario Coyula, Havana’s director of urbanism and architecture in the 1970s and ’80s, said that wide-scale buying and selling would lead to a “huge rearrangement” in Havana and other cities as the wealthy move to better areas. He and others said it would inevitably exacerbate class conflict.

And because the island has a shortage of housing — with many families and even divorced couples continuing to live together for lack of a better option — critics say that any displacement could raise the prospect of homelessness. For example, if two families are sharing a home and one holds what currently amounts to Cuban title with limited rights, the new law says that the titleholder can sell and the tenant family will eventually have to move.

Many Cubans say they are afraid that the market system will leave them in the lurch.

“What happens if I sell my home and then I can’t find another one to buy? Where do I sleep?” said Félix Méndez, a 47-year-old hospital technician looking at signs for property exchanges tacked to trees on a Havana boulevard. He said he would prefer to stick with the complex bartering system currently in use. (Under the new law, that too will be subject to a tax — 4 percent of the value of the transaction.)

One unanswered question involves the role of foreigners and Cuban exiles. The law generally requires permanent residency, but Mr. Freyre said the section of the law applying to areas of “descanso” or “veraneo” — vacation or summer destinations — leaves open the possibility of looser enforcement in selected places, perhaps coastal areas, Old Havana and the golf communities that are currently under development with foreign investment.

The new law does not broach the subject of property confiscated by the government in the early years of the revolution. Lawyers and experts say these claims, representing tens of billions of dollars, are still a long shot. Property law worldwide generally favors compensation, not the right of return, and Cuba has yet to show serious interest in addressing the issue. Officials have insisted that the United States must first pay restitution for the economic damage caused by the 1962 trade embargo.

Still, sanctioned or not, Cuban-Americans will undoubtedly find a way into Cuban real estate. With President Obama’s 2009 decision to allow unlimited travel and remittances for Cuban-Americans, a constant flow of money and visits has become the norm. In exile communities like Miami, there are already efforts under way to funnel money to relatives so that they can buy new homes or old family homes that were nationalized.

Most experts, and Cubans on the island, expect these efforts to accelerate. Nov. 10 may be the starting gun for an indirect investment race.

“I don’t know if they will control the market,” Philip Peters, an expert at the Lexington Institute in Washington, said of Cuban-Americans. “But it is certainly going to be the case that the market is going to settle in a way that’s heavily influenced by demand from outside Cuba coming from relatives.”

Of course, even if the market is open, it may not be transparent. The culture of hiding wealth, from the government, from neighbors, is deeply engrained in Cuba, and though the new law includes the threat of prison for people caught lying about home prices, Cubans who work in real estate today expect buyers and sellers to disguise the true value of transactions.

“Nobody who has been working, honestly, in a job in Cuba in the past 50 years could possibly afford to buy a second home,” said Gerardo, a property broker in Havana who asked that his full name not be used because his job was still illegal. “That money has to come from relatives overseas.”

He added that nascent capitalism would probably include a black market just as hard to figure out and uproot as the underground economy that has grown up around decades of socialism.

In Spain, Creating a Back-to-the-Land Experience

By RATHA TEP

CASARES, Spain — The curvy drive from the sleepy Andalusian village of Casares to Chris and Lisa Stone’s mountainside vacation home should take about 10 minutes—unless a herd of goats ambles across the road.

Stefano Buonamici for The New York Times

The terrace off the sitting room provides a view of the lush, green valley that surrounds the Genal River.

 

The area, about 20 miles north of Gibraltar and slightly farther inland from the Mediterranean coast, is a stark departure from the manicured resort community of Sotogrande, where the British residents had their previous vacation home. “Sotogrande is beautiful, but it’s like a country club,” said Ms. Stone, 49, a partner at the London private equity firm HgCapital. Longing to feel more rooted in nature, she and her husband, Chris, 48, the chief executive of the British firm Northgate Information Solutions, found their way to this picturesque setting in southern Spain.

The Stones learned of the available mountain plot through a local house painter. And when the couple, who have two children, Alexandra, 13, and Benedict, 9, visited the site in 2004, they said they were immediately won over. The commanding views include the classic Andalusian village of Gaucín, with its white-washed homes, perched on the crest of the Sierra del Hacho, and the jagged mountains of the Serranía de Ronda to the east. There was the added bonus of the vast nature preserve of the Sierra Crestellina, with its steep Jurassic limestone ridge, and home to wild boars, large horned muflons, and foxes.

The Stones were finalizing plans to buy the plot in 2004. But there was a catch. Casares officials had not issued a permit to allow building on the site, a process that could be difficult. “So we pulled out,” Ms. Stone said. “We weren’t going to buy the most expensive goat tract around.”

What followed, Ms. Stone said, was a year of “hemming and hawing” over other Andalusian properties that had building permits but just didn’t compare to the initial site. Finally, armed with determination and deft navigation of local building laws, the Stones in 2005 acquired the original plot of land they fell in love with, and received a permit to build. But the path was hard-won. They also had to buy an adjacent smaller site that had an existing building permit, then they had to convince officials at Casares town hall to let them transfer the permit to the original, larger site. They spent 2.2 million euros (about $2.8 million at the time) for a total of 120 acres.

Working with the American architect John Onken, who is based in the San Francisco Bay area but also has an office in Surrey, England, the couple aspired to create a home that merged with its natural surroundings. No trees felled or large rock outcroppings were to be removed. They also wanted its structural form to blend with the pueblos blancos, white villages, that dot the region’s rocky cliff sides — like “lots of cubes joined up,” Ms. Stone said.

On a visit to the site in 2006, Ms. Stone and Mr. Onken staked out the property’s footprint, armed with yellow camping pegs, string, and measuring tape. The 10,800-square-foot home with seven bedrooms was completed in 2009 at a cost of about $260 per square foot. The modular-shaped house has three main levels and a mezzanine, and includes nine bathrooms and a self-contained apartment. Spanish blue limestone floors extend onto six terraces. The Stones wanted their home to resemble a pueblo blanco in miniature. So the home’s exterior walls are clad in bright white stucco, and the roof lines are of differing heights — 7.5 meters (nearly 25 feet) at its highest. Many of the south-facing windows have custom metal screenwork— inspired by traditional iron bars and wooden latticework— both for an ornamental look and to help the house keep cool in the summer.

As large as it is, the house seems to be “rising out of the ground,” Mr. Stone said. The house is cut into a northwest-facing slope so its ground level protrudes out of the earth in varying degrees; for instance, while one northwest-facing guest bedroom has sliding glass doors that open out to the manicured lawn, the cinema room, snug in a southern stretch of the house, is completely subterranean. Gray stones collected from the land form a decorative wall three meters (almost 10 feet) high along the property’s northwest-facing facade.

Nowhere is the melding of home and the landscape more apparent than when passing through the brown metal front doors on the first floor. The doors open onto an expansive glass wall with a vista of a wooded valley, and beyond, the white-washed buildings of Gaucin surrounded by mountains. The glass wall is opposite the entrance and makes up most of one side of a long and narrow hallway.

“It’s a ‘hit-you-in-the-face’ kind of moment,” Mr. Onken said of the majestic view.

Near the glass panel’s edge in the hallway stands a life-size, bronze-cast replica of a wild boar — a nod to the hairy swine that roam the property. Ms. Stone bought it from an antiques fair in Sussex as a birthday present for her husband.

The entrance hallway connects what are effectively the two wings of the house. On one side is an open-air terrarium, bounded by glass, which holds Kentia palm trees transplanted from elsewhere on the site. Ascending six Spanish blue limestone steps on this side of the house is the sitting room, with made-to-order modern white sofas and pale lavender armchairs carefully arranged to capture striking mountain views. On the other side of the entrance hallway is the dining room, which has a custom table crafted from a solid oak plank top (a gift from a carpenter friend). The table’s base of hand-forged iron shaped into delicate branches and twigs was created by an English-born metal craftsman Sebastian Fisher who has a workshop in Casares.

Mr. Fisher’s exquisite metal work also can be seen in the staircase off the dining room, which uses the same branch- and twig- motif for its striking balustrade. Next to the staircase is a spacious room that combines both kitchen, with its black granite countertops, and family room, and serves as the heart of the house. Upstairs, stark white walls and light-colored curtains add to the airiness of the master bedroom and children’s rooms, which have bleached oak floor plank and large windows, which overlook a garden of oleander hedges, and cork trees that are hundreds of years old.

The Stones said they are committed to eating off the land on their visits, which number about seven a year. They grow lettuce and tomatoes, and harvest olives from gnarly olive trees, pressing them for oil at a local mill. They also have an agreement with a neighboring dairy farmer to let his 60 goats wander on a portion of their property in exchange for wheels of cheese.

The couple pined to put the brakes on their busy lives with a back-to-the-land experience. They got their wish. As Ms. Stone put it, “it’s total relaxation.”

The Height of Fashion, Six Floors Under

By ELAINE SCIOLINO

Published: October 5, 2011

 

A CINDERELLA moment was fast approaching. Damir Doma was ordered to leave his own party.

The designer was hosting a Fashion Week celebration of his collection with 250 guests at David Lynch’s new underground entertainment space, Silencio. But with midnight looming, Mr. Doma’s three-hour time slot was ending. The club had to be emptied — and fast — to make way for an even bigger party hosted by the rapper-turned-designer Kanye West.

More than 20 minutes of pleading and threats by Mr. Doma’s agents led nowhere. Music being played by Mike Nouveau, the D.J., was cut mid-song. The guests, some angry, some sullen, some bemused, were unceremoniously ushered up the club’s six-story staircase and out onto the street.

“We still love you,” Mr. Doma intoned flatly as he walked past the interior designer Rafael Navot, who collaborated with Mr. Lynch on Silencio. He delivered the words with an ambiguity and smooth irony that might have pleased Mr. Lynch, the American filmmaker, artist and — now — Paris nightclub creator.

Silencio had not yet had its official opening (that comes Thursday night) but the place already had the edgy feel of a David Lynch movie.

“This is a very fragile moment,” Mr. Navot said after Mr. Doma had gone. “It’s important that at the beginning the boom is there. We need to convey the concept of the club — big.”

Silencio, which is named after the creepy theater in Mr. Lynch’s 2001 dark mystery/love story, “Mulholland Drive,” is an architectural execution of his cinematic passion for shapes, textures, light and illusion. No matter that it wasn’t quite ready to open.

Paris Fashion Week, with all its glitter and hype, was too tempting an opportunity to pass up. So the 2,100-square-foot not-quite-finished club was transformed this past week into a must-see, must-experience hothouse for the visiting fashion-and-media elite. In addition to Mr. Doma and Mr. West, party hosts included Proenza Schouler, Gareth Pugh, Balenciaga, Hermès and Chanel.

Mr. West attracted the largest number of celebrities: the Olsen twins; Marc Jacobs’s perfume model, Karlie Kloss; the actor-singer Jared Leto; Solange Knowles, Beyoncé’s sister; Chanel Iman; the Israeli model Bar Refaeli; the Belgian designer Kris Van Assche; the American actress Jessica Biel; and Lindsay Lohan.

So many — too many — people came. Thick, self-important crowds made both moving and breathing difficult. You needed to avoid thinking that you were six stories below ground. Outside, the Paris police came to help control a want-to-get-in crowd that swelled to 300.

Gareth Pugh’s party, by contrast, catered more to women in space-age costumes. Hermès’s was small and sedate, the dancing by the mostly French crowd disciplined and controlled.

The location of Silencio is a perfect fit for Mr. Lynch. The building — 142, rue Montmartre, near the Paris Stock Exchange in the second arrondissement — is a Paris landmark, constructed by the same atelier that designed the Eiffel Tower. Originally a printing house, it was the headquarters for newspapers like the left-leaning L’Aurore, which printed Émile Zola’s open letter, “J’Accuse,” in defense of Alfred Dreyfus, in 1898.

“Once I saw the space and the strange underground rooms and learned its history, I got into it,” Mr. Lynch said in an interview.  “It felt like designing film interiors, where mood is all important. I wanted to make a space that supports good feeling.”

The Paris Silencio is different from the “Mulholland Drive” Club Silencio — more opulent than ominous. With the space two years in the making and at a cost of 3 million euros (about $4 million), its preopening P.R. appears to be working; already it has been compared to the Dadaists’ Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, Andy Warhol’s Factory in New York and the existentialists’ Café Flore on the Left Bank.

Upon entry, the darkness of the black staircase opens into a series of golden spaces — not the shiny tinsel-gold of five-star hotels in places like Abu Dhabi or Hong Kong, but soft gold leaf on arches and walls constructed from small blocks of raw oak. (The same group of artisans responsible for the gold domes of the Invalides, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington and the flame of the Statue of Liberty laid on the gold leaf with special brushes). The lighting plays with reality. Lights ringing the mirrors in the restroom turn viewers’ eyes into bright cats’ eyes. Walls are not painted but covered with natural materials like decomposed marble. Ceilings are lined with strips of golden metal that function as distortion mirrors.

A dream forest with pale yellow steel trees and two-way mirrors that give the illusion of infinity will serve as (this being Paris) a smoking room. There is a 24-seat movie theater and a loungelike library. A live stage with a translucent and reflective dance floor evokes the feel of the film’s Club Silencio, whose magicians says, “It’s all an illusion.”

Silencio will open as a member’s only club, with an annual membership of 780 euros (about $1,040) — or 420 euros (about $560) for anyone under 30 and for those living outside of France. The aim is to attract a core global membership of 2,000 people in the arts, including fashion and interior designers, artists, writers, musicians, actors and chefs, said Arnaud Frisch, one of Silencio’s owners. (The membership application also lists more commercial professions, like advertising and communication specialists and business owners.)

On Tuesdays through Sundays, from 6 p.m. until midnight, only members — and one guest each — will be admitted; but from midnight until 6 a.m., the club opens its doors to all. (There is a maximum occupancy of 350, although the comfort level is only about 200.)

There are wrinkles that still need to be ironed out. The glass insulation wall and door for the smoking room were damaged in transit and won’t be installed for about two more weeks. A temporary, under-ventilated fumoir in a still-to-be-designated space is not for the faint-of-breath.

The two chief bartenders are among the most creative and experienced in Paris, but some of the servers could use more training. One waitress could not tell a customer what was in the cocktail called “Skinny”: (mint, cucumber, lime, elderflower syrup, Perrier). Then she spilled some of it on the table.

“Napkin, please,” Coralie Gauthier, the press spokeswoman for Silencio, commanded.

BUT those invited to the parties seemed to be pleased.

“I’m a big Lynch fan; I can’t get enough of ‘Mulholland Drive,’ ” said Thakoon Panichgul, the Thai-American designer. “Somebody said there was a party at Silencio. I said Silencio as in ‘Mulholland Drive’ Silencio? And that’s all I needed to know.”

Imran Amed, a fashion consultant educated at Harvard Business School who writes the Business of Fashion blog, came out of curiosity. “I had to come to this party, I had to see this space,” he said. “Maybe I fell for the P.R.”

Mr. Lynch fits in well in France. In 2007, the Fondation Cartier in Paris exhibited a collection of paintings and lithographs by Mr. Lynch, who was an artist before he became a film director. The Cinématheque Français has hosted a retrospective of his films. His 1982 film, “The Elephant Man,” won a César, France’s version of the Oscar, for best foreign film; his 1990 film, “Wild at Heart,” won the Palme d’Or at Cannes.

And he has been decorated by President Nicolas Sarkozy as an “officier” of the Legion of Honor, the second of several ranks of an award created by Napoleon in 1802 for service to the French state. In his acceptance speech, Mr. Lynch said, “It’s no secret that I love France, the art-making, art-loving and art-supporting people of France.”

For the past three years, Mr. Lynch has worked in the lithographic studio in Montparnasse that Picasso and Miró used, “drawing on the same stones where they painted,” he said.

“Now that Silencio exists, I am no longer the director who controls the action, the marionette who pulls the strings, the musician who masters the sounds,” Mr. Lynch told a French interviewer for L’Express. That feeling of letting go, he added, brings with it both “relief and slight anxiety.”

And, paradoxically, a sense of empowerment, as well. “Looking at what we have done,” he said, “I feel myself almost immortal.”