Las Urbanistas

Jock Fistick for The New York Times

Gregg Svingen of Seattle, Wash., and his girlfriend, Sophie Jacobs, rent a chic corner flat in this building in Brussels’ city center. They plan to buy in Brussels soon.

BRUSSELS — Apartments here don’t get much more central than Gregg Svingen’s one-bedroom place just off Boulevard Emile Jacqmain, a busy thoroughfare that snakes through the Belgian capital.

Jock Fistick for The New York Times

The view of downtown Brussels from Mr. Svingen’s terrace.

Jock Fistick for The New York Times

Bar Bik, a new restaurant, is just around the corner from Mr. Svingen’s flat and is a favorite spot of the couple.

Jock Fistick for The New York Times

Mr. Svingen signed a nine-year lease in 2003 for this apartment. He pays 723 euros, or $950, a month in rent.

Directly in front of his building is Rue Neuve, the city’s main shopping street. On the left is the shimmering glass home of the National Theater; on the right, central Brussels’s oldest hotel and biggest movie complex. And the Grand Place, considered to be one of the most beautiful squares in the world, is a five-minute stroll away, as are most of the city’s finest bars and restaurants.

“It’s amazing to live downtown,” said Mr. Svingen, a 34-year-old American from Seattle, who works as a consultant for a lobbying firm called the Centre. “Before Brussels, I never thought it would be possible to live slap-bang in the center.”

Until the mid-1990s, few urban professionals would have been tempted to live in the neighborhood, which was better known for sex shops than hip restaurants. But the area is rapidly changing, altered mainly by young Flemish professionals and expatriates like Mr. Svingen — although he recently decided to take advantage of the growing property market and buy a place in the city suburbs. “Downtown is definitely changing for the better,” he said, surveying the sidewalk-widening work going on below his balcony. “But I don’t know how long the prices will remain democratic.”

The cost of renting and buying property has risen in the eight years that Mr. Svingen has lived in Brussels, where both NATO and the 27-member European Union have their headquarters. But despite the increases, Brussels remains one of the cheapest places to buy or to rent among all the European Union capitals.

“The politicians in Belgium think it’s horribly expensive here, but only because they don’t compare it to anywhere else,” said Iain Cook, chief executive of the local branch of ERA Real Estate, which has offices in 40 countries.

The average rent for a one-bedroom apartment of 60 square meters, or almost 650 square feet, in an upscale district of Brussels is $1,280 a month. That is half the average price in Paris and less than a third the cost of renting in London and New York, according to Mercer Human Resources Consulting, which helps clients around the world find housing for expatriate employees.

Tenants like Mr. Svingen, who signed a nine-year lease in 2003, are also protected by Belgian laws that make it difficult for rent increases to exceed the rate of inflation.

He pays 723 euros, or $950, a month for his 88-square-meter, or 947-square-foot apartment. The amount includes services charges but no utilities; he also pays an additional 60 euros, or $79, a month to rent a garage on his street.

It certainly is possible to find cheaper apartments in Brussels, but not with the same kind of parquet flooring, stucco moldings, high ceilings, wraparound balconies and French windows that flood the apartment with natural light.

“The great thing about Brussels is you can rent without feeling guilty about throwing your money away,” said Mr. Svingen, who lived in England and France before settling in Belgium. “In London and Paris they scrimp on the space but certainly not on the price.”

Despite the cheap rent and the buzz of living downtown, Mr. Svingen and his Dutch partner, Sophie Jacobs, are about to buy an apartment in Ixelles, a trendy suburb favored by expats. “I’m buying because the property market in Belgium is growing at a healthy rate,” he said, but is not as expensive as London, Dublin or New York.

In fact, house prices in Brussels over the last two years have grown at a faster rate than in any of those three cities. In 2006, the value of town houses rose by 13 percent, and apartments by almost 10 percent, according to the Belgium Economics Ministry. This followed a 17.1 percent jump in house prices in 2005, the largest increase in the 12-nation Eurozone.

But residential property in the Belgian capital is still cheap compared with other major European cities, partly because the purchase tax is just 17 percent. According to the ERA Europe Market Survey 2006, the average price of a dwelling of 100 square meters, or slightly more than 1,075 square feet, was 217,462 euros in Brussels, 297,462 euros in Paris, 360,427 euros in London and 368,000 euros in Dublin. (In dollars, the figures would be approximately $286,000 in Brussels, $391,000 in Paris, $474,000 in London and $484,000 in Dublin.)

“If you are looking for a good return on your investment, property in Brussels is still a good buy,” said Mr. Cook, the ERA real estate agent, who added that house prices are expected to continue to rise by 5 to 10 percent this year in spite of higher interest rates.

It is clear from the way Mr. Svingen greets waiters at a local Flemish restaurant, enthuses about the new Ukrainian supermarket that has just opened around the corner and proudly proclaims that work is a 12-minute door-to-door hop by public transport that cheap housing is not the main reason he decided to live in Brussels.

He acknowledged that there is a downside that includes bureaucracy, the squally weather — surely nothing new for someone raised in Seattle — and indifferent customer service, which, he said, “takes nonchalance to a new level.”

But “between Paris, London and Brussels, I’d choose here anytime,” he said. “We’re very spoiled in this city. “Apartments are cheap and of high quality, the restaurants are great and getting around the city is easy.”

Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times

Jimmy O’Pharrow, 81, founded a boxing club in Starrett City.

Life on the sixth floor of Building F3 continued more or less as usual last week. Fran Garcia’s 2-year-old grandson, in his pajama bottoms, padded down the hall to 6G, where Ethel Banks, 78, was lighting a candle in memory of her identical twin sister, June.

In 6E, a retired transit worker, Freddy Trow, 77, was sitting with Josie, his sweetheart, who had come down from 7C in a red satin housedress. At the end of the hall was Anna Sadovskaya, who worked for 30 years as a chemist, formulating plastics in Ukraine. She had made a honey cake.

Ms. Garcia grew up in Brooklyn, surrounded by family members in Canarsie. They were Italian, and 26 years ago, when she announced that she was moving to Starrett City, now called Spring Creek Towers, “they considered it the projects.” But now, after the decades of baptisms and cancer treatments and holiday dinners, the sixth floor has become her family.

“You just go over for coffee,” she said, “and before you know it, their children are godparents to your grandchildren.”

The relationships grew organically, but they were no accident. Starrett City was an audacious work of social engineering. It was marketed as an exclusive island of middle-class strivers in the blighted neighborhood of East New York, Brooklyn, when residents first moved in in 1974; even more remarkably, its planners carefully arranged families on each hallway, like chess pieces, to maintain the racial mix they considered most stable: 70 percent white to 30 percent black. Now, the 5,881-unit rental complex is being sold, prompting a fresh debate over affordable housing.

The unorthodox leasing practices have been abandoned, but residents still feel their community is “better than outside,” as Freddy Trow put it. Certainly it is cheaper; base rents are $1,100 a month for a two-bedroom apartment, but most are augmented by state and federal subsidies, so some tenants pay as little as $141.

But people felt proud to live here for reasons that had nothing to do with price, said Rabbi Avner German, one of the complex’s original tenants, who has served as an anchor and booster of its Jewish community.

“Starrett City was not sitting in the most ideal racial area of the city,” he said. “But there was a sort of — the Hebrew word is chavod — respect and honor that you felt that you lived at Starrett.”

The development, he said, “is not just another place.”

From the sixth floor of F3, where Ms. Garcia lives, Starrett City looks stark and well ordered. Forty-six dun-colored towers are distributed in empty spaces, crisscrossed by walkways and benches. The buildings abut Jamaica Bay on one side and, at 20 stories, soar above anything else nearby.

Ian Aisenberg, who grew up here in the 1980s, remembers watching from the window of his apartment while summer thunderstorms approached, obscuring Manhattan and then “kind of marching across Brooklyn.”

Shaping a Community

It is no coincidence that the complex resembles Co-op City in the Bronx. Both communities were commissioned by the United Housing Foundation, a venture of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, whose leaders hoped to move workers out of decaying tenements and into modern living arrangements. In the afternoons, children pour out of schools on the property and make their way home to their families’ apartments. If they are playing outside in the evenings, their parents stick their heads out the window and call them home for dinner.

To Ms. Garcia, who moved here with her husband in 1981 because the rents were so inexpensive, the area in and around F3 is now laced with personal memories. Here is the patch of grass where Josie’s husband died of a heart attack. Here is the laundry room where Bella, her first neighbor, sat beside her, watching the laundry, and described swimming across an icy river to escape from the Nazis.

“She said, ‘I don’t want to upset you, but I just want someone to know,’ ” Ms. Garcia said.

Here is the hallway where her neighbor’s son, Kalise, used to loll on his back, waiting for his mother to come home. Eventually, Ms. Garcia just gathered Kalise into her own noisy apartment after school; before long, black neighbors were sitting at her table at holidays. It was the first time her Italian relatives had eaten with black people.

“I just acted as if this was our regular holiday meal — the way he had it the year before and the year before and the year before,” she said.

Starrett City can be seen as the site of a protracted experiment in human psychology. The original plan to sell the apartments as co-ops fell through, and a group of investors, led by the financier Disque D. Deane, took control, converting it to an enormous rental complex. The state and federal governments stepped in with subsidies, interest-free loans and tax breaks to help the project.

Still, neighbors in Canarsie, just to the south, were aghast at the idea of a large low-income rental complex opening on the shore. To appease the city’s Board of Estimate, and secure a lucrative tax abatement, the developers of the rental complex promised that 70 percent of the units would be rented to white people, said Robert C. Rosenberg, who served as general manager of Starrett City from 1973 to 1997. That was the proportion that developers believed would prevent the complex from “tipping,” and becoming segregated.

“They had no idea in their wildest dreams how that was going to happen,” said Mr. Rosenberg, a former New York City housing commissioner. “People were running out to the suburbs.”

He described East New York as “like being in Dresden during the war.”

Mr. Rosenberg set about changing the development’s image. He bid, specifically, for the affections of would-be suburbanites, painting Starrett City as a self-enclosed community with its own schools, shopping mall and a 65-member private security force. He aired advertisements on television, showing “three white tenants, one black, one Hispanic tenant,” Mr. Rosenberg said. He distributed millions of copies of Starrett City’s community newspaper, The Sun, before the first tenant had moved in.

When the first settlers arrived, they felt as if they were buying into a fully formed dream.

Marie Purnell, the current president of the Starrett City Tenants’ Association, had lived for 19 years in the Cypress Hill Houses in eastern Brooklyn, and suffered three break-ins. Like all the new tenants, she had to submit to a criminal background check, home visit and credit check before her tenancy was approved. All this delighted her. She brought pillows over and slept on the floor of her apartment in an almost entirely empty building, before there were working locks on the doors.

Ms. Purnell, 76, who is black, said that she wanted to move out of her old apartment “and move into Starrett City.”

Of the racial quotas and other controls, she said: “They needed them. They needed them and it worked.”

Slowly, the “white waiting list” began to build. Mr. Rosenberg encouraged Jewish organizations to distribute applications to prospective émigrés in Moscow and Kiev, and dedicated land at Starrett City for a synagogue and a yeshiva, which Rabbi German continues to lead.

Searching for Diversity

Still, Mr. Rosenberg allowed thousands of units to remain empty rather than rent them to black families — “controlled tenanting,” he called it — and allowed the “black waiting list” to grow to around 10,000 names. Consulting with Kenneth B. Clark, the black psychologist, Mr. Rosenberg experimented with mixtures of races, and concluded that whites were more comfortable staying in the building “when we threw in Chinese.”

“Their tolerance would grow if I could mix up the minorities,” he said.

Within five years, the scheme was challenged by a class-action lawsuit, and in 1988, when the United States Supreme Court refused to hear Starrett City’s appeal, the practice was dropped. That year, in a speech that Mr. Rosenberg gave in France at a conference on integration, he called the rental scheme “the most philosophically troublesome aspect of the last 15 years of my career.”

At the same time, Mr. Rosenberg said in a recent interview, the strategy succeeded: “The older people who moved in never lost their prejudices. But the young people who grew up there, they never had them.”

Ian Lekus, 36, who now teaches history at the University of Georgia, would agree. Recently, he found his sixth-grade class photo, taken at Public School 346 in Starrett City, to show friends how the class broke down racially: roughly one-third white, one-third black and one-third Asian and Hispanic.

Not until his family moved to Canarsie, where “that kind of diversity was clearly not welcome,” did he understand that Starrett City had been an anomaly.

“It was one of those places where it was possible for kids to live out the ‘I have a dream’ speech,” he said.

Not everyone’s memories are utopian. What sticks with Mr. Aisenberg, 37, is the memory of crack cocaine sweeping through East New York in the 1980s. His mother finally left the neighborhood after she was robbed outside her apartment. The Brooklyn of his childhood, he said, was “kind of an ugly place,” and he never stopped pining for the suburban spaces he left behind.

Some troubles persist. Last month, the police blotter in the community newspaper, now The Spring Creek Sun, reported that a resident walking in front of D5 was shot in broad daylight by another resident, who escaped through a parking garage.

Residents still grumble about the buses that connect Starrett City with inland Brooklyn, which make their last trip of the night at 1 a.m. Several early settlers said they regretted the end of the quota system, and worry that the complex’s Russian speakers have little desire to assimilate.

“I love them,” said Joyce Peeples, a resident for 31 years, “but they have their own group.”

Market forces have shaped the community since the quota system was dropped in 1988. The waiting list was 80 percent black, Mr. Rosenberg said in a speech at the time. But today, Starrett City’s census tract remains racially balanced, with a population of 14,620 that is 32 percent white, 41 percent black and 19 percent Hispanic. More than a third are foreign-born. Two thousand are émigrés from the former Soviet Union; they sun themselves on benches when most everyone else feels it is too cold to venture out.

The variety is apparent everywhere in Starrett City. On a recent morning, older people in the community center were singing with clavicle-rattling gusto. Among their favorites is “Zhdi Menya,” a sentimental ballad (translation: “Wait for Me”) from the Great Patriotic War, which is what the Soviets called World War II.

At the Starrett City Boxing Club, the coach and founder, Jimmy O’Pharrow, painstakingly arranges fights for Dmitriy Salita, his star fighter, who was born in Odessa, Ukraine. Mr. Salita, 25, is a junior welterweight. He is also an Orthodox Jew who does not fight, fly or open a car door on the Sabbath.

“I deal with it,” said Mr. O’Pharrow, 81, who is black. “I get on the rabbi sometimes.”

Why Change a Good Thing?

Throughout Starrett City last week, worried residents made the same argument: Instead of making any changes to their community, developers should build more communities like Starrett City all over the country — affordable, orderly mixed income, mixed race mini-societies.

“It’s not an experiment,” Ms. Purnell said. “It may have been an experiment at the beginning, but we have shown that it works.”

In F3, where Ms. Garcia and her neighbors live, the residents’ lives have become so entwined that a single death in the building is, as Ms. Garcia puts it, “a missing thump in the rhythm of life.”

News of the rental complex’s sale has raised a bigger worry in recent weeks, that the whole community will go to pieces. The average tenancy on Ms. Garcia’s floor is 20 years. The ice cream man, Johnny, has been making the rounds since the 1970s. None of the normal rules of real estate apply.

“We don’t want anything to change,” Ms. Garcia said. “If you throw a rock into a calm pool of water, everything will start to change.”

Even Mr. Trow, whose views on Starrett City are notoriously cranky, sounded sentimental, remembering the fresh flowers in the lobby when he moved in 33 years ago.

“The main thing is, you’re bettering yourself,” he said. “That’s what it is.”

WEST HOLLYWOOD, Calif.

J. Emilio Flores for The New York Times

Customers line up to top yogurt with fruit at the Pinkberry store in the Westwood section of Los Angeles.

J. Emilio Flores for The New York Times

The chain now has many rivals.

CONDEMNATIONS have been made. Mildly menacing Internet comments have been exchanged. A lawsuit and a police report have been filed. Multitudes of parking altercations have occurred, with government officials summoned.

Yes, frozen yogurt is back.

For the past year, congeries of women in Ugg boots have lined up outside a chain of shops called Pinkberry to get a taste of Los Angeles’s newest take on the airy, low-fat treat of yore. Otherwise reasonable people have hopped from illegally parked cars and waited as long as an hour to get a little cup of sour yogurt, in two flavors, plain and green tea, often topped with fresh fruit, or, inexplicably, Fruity Pebbles cereal.

Pinkberry’s original store has drawn the ire of its West Hollywood neighbors after nearly a year of parking dramas and lawns dotted with small paper cups bearing little pink swirls.

The company’s squabbles with the competitors that have sprouted around town have been the subject of fierce debate on Los Angeles food blogs and more than a dozen news articles in the local press. The rivals have plans to expand into Las Vegas and Florida. Meanwhile a company in Korea claims that it was the inspiration for Pinkberry.

Undeterred, Pinkberry has marched on with its own expansion, opening nine new stores in Los Angeles County over the last three months, and three in New York.

How has frozen yogurt, the leg warmer of food trends, managed to stage such a showy comeback?

When frozen yogurt was introduced in the 1970s, the American public was largely unwilling to countenance its tart taste. In the 1980s, the chains The Country’s Best Yogurt (now TCBY) and I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt added flavors and sugars, creating cloyingly sweet and chalky products.

Consumers were charmed by this low-fat, lower-calorie alternative to ice cream and its odious cousin, ice milk. Sales of frozen yogurt soared over 200 percent a year from the mid 1980s until the early 1990s.

But then a wave of new reduced-fat ice creams turned up and “frozen yogurt started to take a dive,” said Steven Young, a food technologist and an ice cream expert who runs a consulting firm in Houston.

In 2005, 65 million gallons of frozen yogurt were produced in the United States, a significant decline from 1990, when 117.6 million gallons of the stuff was made, according to the International Dairy Foods Association.

The frozen yogurt that has taken Los Angeles by storm resembles the early, sour frozen yogurt more than its artificially flavored progeny. And the current craze seems to spring from Korea, where a company called Red Mango started selling sour-style yogurt in 2004.

Its 150 stores offer frozen yogurt made from a powdered base imported from Italy. “We call it natural, authentic yogurt,” said Brandon Jo, chief executive officer of Red Mango Inc., the company’s North American unit, which is opening its first American store in Westwood this April.

Around the same time Red Mango got started, Shelly Hwang and her boyfriend, Young Lee, who are both from Korea, were attempting to open a tea parlor in West Hollywood. When the neighborhood rejected their application for a liquor license, the two switched gears. In early 2005, Pinkberry was born.

Mr. Lee said there is nothing Korean about the idea, but Pinkberry closely resembles Red Mango: two flavors only, plain and green tea, served with toppings such as strawberries, sweetened cereals, coconut and, if one knows to ask, mochi — Japanese sticky rice. (“We don’t put that out,” Mr. Lee said. “It is kind of like going to In-N-Out Burger and ordering ‘animal style.’ ”)

By spring of 2006, Pinkberry was so successful that neighbors of its original shop began to complain about parking and litter to the West Hollywood City Council. The store was ordered to shorten its evening hours and place guards in front to help control the crowds. Employees began to pick up litter.

Yet some neighbors want the store’s license revoked. The city is trying to facilitate a compromise, and officials believe the spread of Pinkberry locations across Los Angeles may ease the traffic at the original store, said Susan Healy Keene, the director of community development for West Hollywood.

In the meantime, Pinkberry competitors have opened all over town.

There is Kiwiberri, and Fiore, in the Japanese Village Plaza downtown. Seeking the entrance to a parking structure in Westwood recently, I was momentarily stymied by a tiny shop called Snowberry, which was selling, well, you know.

In November, a shop called Berri Good opened in Fairfax, with kosher certification and a chartreuse-and-pink logo that is barely distinguishable from Pinkberry’s.

“I don’t think we’re the same,” said Uzi Moses, the owner of Berri Good. “We use different fonts.” On top of that, he said, “You know we have celebrities here, right? Are you aware of that?”

Watching it all unfold, Red Mango executives are half frosted and half convinced that they are getting free market research, Mr. Jo said. “We are a little annoyed but at the same time they are introducing the product category to the marketplace.”

Mr. Lee takes competition very seriously. John Bae, the owner of Kiwiberri, said that Mr. Lee had visited one of his stores puffing on a cigar and appeared to be up to something other than research.

“He came over at 11 p.m. and told me, ‘I know where you live and I’m going to get you,’ ” Mr. Bae said. He filed a police report claiming he had been threatened with “great bodily harm,” and demanded a restraining order against Mr. Lee, he said. A Los Angeles Police Department spokeswoman said that no restraining order was issued and that no criminal charges were filed. Mr. Lee denies making any threats. There has been one hearing on the matter in the city attorney’s office with another scheduled for next month.

Mr. Lee, who in turn has filed a suit charging Mr. Bae with copying his logo and other trademark infringements, said that he did not like his competitor’s business practices and filed the lawsuit to “teach them a lesson.” Lawyers are engaged in settlement talks, with Pinkberry’s side suggesting, among other things, that Mr. Bae change his logo and put a sign in his store stating that it has no connection to Pinkberry, and that he confess to posing as a regular yogurt lover while posting comments on food blogs under the name “yogurtfanetik.” Mr. Bae called the settlement terms “ridiculous” and denied that he is yogurtfanetik.

Lawsuits, alleged threats and crowd control issues aside, how is Pinkberry’s yogurt? Smooth, with a tangy finish to the plain. Doused with some fresh berries, it is almost addictive, and the lines at many Pinkberry locations seem understandable, even if Cap’n Crunch toppings do not. The green tea flavor is a bit more grainy and overbearing, and makes up less than 40 percent of the sales, Mr. Lee said.

Frozen yogurt’s rebirth appears to be an outgrowth of the nation’s obsession with food that offers health benefits (TCBY, looking for a revival of its own, added more live active cultures to its yogurt’s base) and of its evolving palate.

David Kim, a yoga instructor who lives in Santa Monica, is not remotely concerned about Pinkberry’s competitive issues. He gets his yogurt fix (small plain with mochi) once a week. “O.K., twice,” Mr. Kim said. “If I could, I would get it three times. It doesn’t immediately grab you, but there is something about the flavor that draws you in, and each time you go back you taste something a little bit different. The next thing you know, it’s like crack.”