From across a field it looks almost like a work of modern sculpture. Someone has been building a house here for a number of years, in a truly Egyptian fashion. There is no provision for taking out a loan to build a house and mortgages are only just beginning to be used here, so someone who wants to construct a home must gather the money, pay the builder and hope that there is enough. If you run out of money, you stop building and wait until there is money again. This seems to be the case here, since I've been watching this same building standing in the field for a number of years.
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
Unfinished Business
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6 comments:
Hey - I recognize that building! Or - maybe it looks like all the other unfinished ones : )
hey
how are u?
ok..you may be right but there is an important point ,this unfinished house is gift to the owner son to let he marry ,so the son finish this house for marrage
some time the son is young and the father is afraid of death so he builds this house until his son became a man able to finish it and marry
so the house is unfinished not due to run out of money but as a help form father to his son "as a social duty " .
sorry for bad english.....
bye>>
anbergris@yahoo.com
wow, you'd think they would cover it to protect the struture. Nice palm trees!
You see a lot of this in Lebanon, at least you did up through early 2000, when I was last there. I am going back in Sept. so I will let you know if the country is still full of unfinished villas and high-rises. Maybe the improbable boom of 2000-2006 helped finish off lots of real estate. I really don't like it much... Expatriates build these enormous palaces for their two- or four-week annual visits.
I have a beloved relative who has poured buckets of money into a vast extension to the family home - for himself, his wife, and occasionally his daughter, son & two grandchildren. My relative has had a very tough life so I don't begrudge him his indulgences, but really, the country needs some decent infrastructure more than it needs another 20,000 vacation villas and 1,000 high-rise luxury hotels.
What can I say, we're building luxury condos all over America while our bridges fall down and our schools molder. We're no different anymore.
And yes, with the real estate bust in the States, I fear we're going to see more of those unfinished buildings with the steel ties sticking out. Here in the Bay Area it would be "live-work lofts" built by the thousands near railroad tracks and old waterfronts. How many buyers are there who can afford $750,000 for a one bedroom, cavernous, hard-to-heat-and-cool space next to a busy railroad yard and a freeway?
I've already seen a letter to the local paper complaining about all the rail traffic close to the owner's luxury loft. Who spends $750K without noticing that the core rail line for the West Coast runs right next to the property? Anyway. I see there are two new blocks going up in the loft district and I sincerely wonder how they're ever going to sell those condominiums. Hence the possibility of the steel ties sticking up above the streets of Oakland.
I've had a number of visitors to Egypt from North America remark with varying degrees of bewilderment on the way that it is getting harder to tell the difference between third world and alleged first world countries.
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