For Rent

From the golden sands of its Mediterranean shore to the olive groves and pine trees of its eastern hills, the most characteristic feature of Beirut's skyline is the apartment house. Row upon row of multistoried slabs stand in brightly colored ranks, graced by rooftop gardens, sunken black marble bathtubs with solid gold taps, and airy, glass-walled rooms that look out on full-sailed dhows plying the routes once used by Phoenician triremes. Only trouble is that thousands of the apartments are empty.

Concrete Assets. Monthly rents range from $150 (for one room) to $1,000 (for a seven-room penthouse), with a year's rent payable in advance. Normally, such steep prices would indicate a seller's market, but in the Lebanese capital, the laws of supply and demand are suspended. Perhaps as many as 35,000 apartments are vacant, yet new buildings keep rising amid what may be the most artificial real estate boom since the days of Florida's wild land speculation.

As the foremost playground and financial center in the Eastern Mediterranean, Beirut is choked with well-heeled pashas, politicians and oil sheiks from Iraq, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait--most of them distrustful of cash and preferring concrete investment. In recent years the Arab millionaires have sunk $83 million into Beirut apartment houses. The Kuwaiti sheik who tools past his ten-story property in an air-conditioned Lincoln is delighted that he has converted his money into something solid--even though it may be half empty. "Why should I lower my rents and let the poor people in?" asked one pasha. "That would lower the value of my property."

Given the chance, the poor people would fill the vacant apartments in short order. About 85% of Beirut's 500,000 people live in apartments, many of them overcrowded. Near the fetid Beirut River and in rubbish-strewn vacant lots across the city 10,000 refugees live in squalid shacks built from flattened kerosene cans. A 1954 master plan for the city has yet to materialize, largely because of soaring land costs that have sent the price of a plot on the glossy Corniche that measures about 50 ft. by 20 ft. from $4,000 in 1948 to $100,000 today.

Dizzying Turnover. Even at reduced rents, however, many of the luxury apartments would hardly be bargains. In midsummer, tenants often use buckets to fill their marble bathtubs because the water supply runs out; heating systems freeze during the brief winter, and air-conditioning units conk out during the long, hot summer. Walls are so thin that tenants can hear their neighbors drop their socks. The newer buildings, aglitter with acres of glass, anodized aluminum and burnished Swedish wood, leave much to be desired in the way of design. When the oil millionaires hit town from the sandy back country, they often buy a building simply because its color or shape strikes their fancy. Result: a turnover so dizzying that one apartment dweller complained that he had no fewer than seven landlords in a week.

In this fast-paced game of musical buildings, a strict ritual is observed. "Do you swear on the Koran that you are only making 10% profit on the building you're selling me?" the prospective buyer asks. The outgoing landlord places his hand on the book, nods solemnly, then walks off with as much as double his original investment. Occasionally the victims strike back. One Lebanese sharpie who cleared $500,000 by selling a building to nine Saudis was later found beaten beyond recognition. But, said one local businessman in the spirit of his crafty Phoenician forebears: "If I could make half a million like that, you are welcome to beat me all you want."

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