My friend Joe wrote a post about preserving old Lebanese houses and repeated what I noticed is a common conservationist gripe: Beautiful old Lebanese houses are being replaced by tall glistening buildings.
So I figured it’s about time someone wrote that this actually made sense. Pasted below is the exact comment I made on his blog, after reading that Fouad Chehab’s old residence is one of the lucky few that are actually getting preserved
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This is indeed a smart investment. But while historically significant houses like this one can become economically viable museums, other old houses don’t have such a luxury.
If you own a very old pretty house, you have three options:
1- Leave it alone to rot
2- Invest a lot of money to maintain it
3- Sell it off for a lot of money to those who will build a building in its place.
While the third option seems unsavory, it’s actually the best of the three.
Leaving it alone will make it an environmental and public health hazard. You’ll have to have a lot of money to invest and maintain it because the government won’t give you the money (Because on their priority list, this is below restoring decent electrical power, health care and public safety and they have limited resources).
If you want to maintain it on your own, it should be for your pure fantasy reasons or because you’re hungry for a pat on the back by conservationists and the mayor, or perhaps running for office in the locale where that house has many cherished memories.
Which leaves us with the third option: By building a high rise, you are providing economic opportunity to many workers, masons, raw material importers, furniture makers, architects, engineers, and of course the government, which will earn considerable taxes from the sales of luxury flats and hopefully use the money to better the Lebanese state of affairs, and who knows, perhaps if we build enough high rises, the government will be eventually able to afford conserving other houses..
Hello, my name is Mustapha and I've been blogging about Lebanese society, business and politics since February 2005.
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I have to completely disagree with you on this one. It’s one thing to talk about an individual isolated house, it’s an entirely different issue when it comes to general policy regarding heritage, and the heritage of Lebanon, among the few other things that survived the war, is in its buildings.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and say the big picture is not about just the buildings. It’s about the preservation of our culture. You don’t just keep a few houses as museums to show what your culture was about, you make policy to preserve the whole thing.
Now you might tell me “highrise towers are a sign of progress and modernity”. Well in that case downtown Paris must be one of the most un-modern places in the western hemisphere. Why is Paris Beautiful ? Why do so many people go to Paris ? It’s not just for the museums, it’s the entire city that managed to stay up to date with the world’s trends and yet maintain its own heritage.
This is what we’re missing in Lebanon. In the name of “tatawwour” we’re throwing away the old and replacing with something entirely new, but something that is nothing like us.
What we need, is a change of mentality, a change of policy.
Couldn’t disagree more with your point of view. The houses are a legacy, a part of our history. We are already so good at erasing our history from our minds, we should at least take some steps to maintain the physical evidence of this history.
These old houses must be proclaimed heritage sites, and a law put in place to impose on the owners some maintenance. If the owners do not have the ability to maintain the site, then they would either have a choice of selling it to another individual, or be reclaimed by the state, whose duty would be to restore to its original setting and put it back on the market.
i have to say i agree with bach. beirut is being destroyed with all these high rises, not to mention the extra traffic that the occupants of all the new flats will generate with their multiple cars. the city is becoming quite charmless from that point of view. lucky it is on the sea and still has that dolce vita feel that makes it so special.
Bach, I’m sure you’re a well intentioned person and that you sincerely care about our historical sites,
but this is what I’m hearing from you:
-The government will chose which sites it decide to protect and eventually picks, say 1000 historical sites. (Of course since this is Lebanon, the houses’ owners should reprent a certain sectarian balance)
-Then, it will send the owners if the houses a letter: either you pay maintenance of 1000 dollars per month or we confiscate your house
-the government ends up confiscating say 400 houses, and will have to pay 400,000$ per month maintaining “history” ( of course an extra 100,000$ will be used to maintain a sectarian bureaucracy
-the ministry of culture decides it’s paying too much and raises a “conservation tax” on unsuspecting Lebanese who care more about making ends meet than preserving culture.
Sounds like tyranny to me. As for preserving our history, this is why humans invented photography and 3D rendering
And Mustafa, this is what I’m hearing from you:
- Just because you (or lebanese officials) can’t think of a viable way to maintain Lebanon’s cultural heritage, it’s okay to throw it away and replace it with high rise buildings
- Pictures are as good as the real thing.
Heritage preservation is ongoing in every major (or less than major) city on the planet, why should we as Lebanese care less about our heritage ? And yes it’s probably going to cost the municipalities money to maintain these houses, but the intrinsic value of these monuments will surpass the costs.
As to the details of how it’s going to be done, I’m sure we can start off by looking at how it’s done in other countries, shape it to our liking, and implement it.
And by the way, it’s not “history”, it’s “culture”.
I agree with the other replies. Yes, Lebanon needs more housing and jobs and taxes, but there are always other dimensions than the economic. To completely shelf the cultural aspect, research has shown that high-rise buildings, if built in abundance, will negate the positive effect sea breezes have in reducing pollution in the city. It’s already started.
Also, has the Lebanese free market really ever benefited the lower/middle classes? I doubt that tax on a couple of luxury flats (which, knowing the gov’t would not happen anyway) would make any sort of difference. A free market’s a great thing, but a market that’s sold its soul is something to be pitied.
Culture is very important. Beirut is slowly slipping into a state of non-being, existing far above the scale of the human being. It is alienating and disociating its inhabitants. By removing small, historic houses, we destroy people’s attachment to the city and any attachment younger generations might in turn have.
Which brings me to my final point – history. It’s little surprise that conflict still exists in Lebanon when people are so willing to just destroy their past without addressing it. Those old, rickety houses are a shared history in the country – to destroy them would be to destroy part of what joins the Lebanese together. Furthermore, if you keep taking down the symbols that root Lebanese in their past, they will live in a gray area, never learning from it – never learning how to interact.
Preserving the cultural heritage of the capital should be the responsibility of the citizens as well as the government. Yes, I agree it may be expensive to maintain an old house, and maybe even unaffordable to some, however, if you cant keep up with the maintenance, the answer isn’t knocking down the building and building a highrise, I’m sure there are many families who would love to own a house in Beirut with a garden. It’s a pity that there is little regulation and zoning laws to prevent these building from being destroyed.
there are many options for homeowners to raise money to maintain these properties.
One would be to sublet. Alot of those old buildings are easy to subdivide, if not already subdivided. Rents in Beirut are decent enough to enable someone to maintain the property as well as maybe even derive a small income.
Thank you all for your very valuable and intelligent comments.
As usual, the truth resides somewhere between the two points of view. I hope the readers will have their own conclusions by now.
Mustapha, That’s not what I’m saying. I am saying that there needs some sort of pressure when you are in possession of a heritage site. You own it, you must deserve it.
I find your conclusion a bit hasty. If you don’t take care of it, then destroy it? Come on
I am proposing a solution whereby owners who cannot take of these sites, to be compensated by some sort of public / private foundation that will put it back to norms / standards and place it on the market. And no, it’s not 1000 USD a month. It’s a significant one time fee to restore it, and a minimal fee to keep it maintained, until there is a buyer. And believe me, there is a queue to buy them.
I have been looking for a typical Lebanese house in Beirut for years now, and I can’t find one. Everyone wants to rent, noone wants to sell.
i don’t think i’d mind as much if it were all just a little more practical.
beirut’s lovely buildings are being replaced with less, rather than more, productive structures in the form of these endless residential towers. if they can even all be filled, it will be with \residents\ only physically present a few weeks or months per year. what will this do to the local economy?
if beautiful but dilapidated family homes were being to destroyed to put up office towers, or structurally sound, high capacity middle class apartment blocks, that would be one thing. but ALL these new developments are high-end residential towers or hotels, and it just seems like, once again, the fellas in charge are acting against the interests of sustainable, intelligent urban development in favor of some quick cash.
so what happens when some flavor of crisis hits beirut again, as it surely will do, sooner or later, and sends all the tourists and expats running?
that said, i am very sentimental, so i just hate this trend in general. but while history and character are both worth preserving, the onus in that regard is absolutely on the government, not individual property owners. as you suggest, mustapha, it is unfair and hypocritical to expect others to sacrifice their economic well-being for something as nebulous as \cultural heritage\ unless we all plan on writing out fat checks each month ourselves.
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