Beirut's Puzzling Building Boom

Beirut is that rare city where you can both speak Arabic, buy whiskey, and not worry much about car bombs. Yet, the property boom here makes no sense.

OK here's the thing I don't get about Lebanon. Beirut is gripped by a building boom on the scale of Dubai in 2005, cranes everywhere, condos shooting up from tiny patches of land, prices in the millions of dollars, sometimes the tens of millions of dollars. All this in a country on the perpetual verge both of civil war and renewed fighting between Hezbollah and Israel - and oh by the way, where the average income lags behind that of Mexico. The Beirut building boom only makes sense if you imagine that thousands of rich people will want to establish a second home here as a refuge from Saudi Arabia, etc. And OK yes it's a rare city where you can both speak Arabic, buy whiskey, and not worry overmuch about car bombs just at the moment. Yet still ... the property boom makes no very obvious sense to the foreign visitor.

And when you ask the people here about it, they just shrug and agree: "Yes you are right, it makes no sense."