Las Urbanistas

Shawn Baldwin for The New York Times

A man walks past the entrance to a tomb and the remains of a home in the village of Gurna near Luxor, Egypt.

GURNA, Egypt — The Egyptian authorities have evicted hundreds of peasants from this village in southern Egypt because their mud brick houses, which have sat atop some of the world’s most treasured and ancient tombs for centuries, were leaking sewage onto priceless antiquities.

Shawn Baldwin for The New York Times
Egypt, trying to avoid unrest, offered houses in New Gurna to peasants living atop ancient tombs, but 80 families are holding out for a better deal.

The New York Times
Egypt is seeking to relocate residents of Gurna to villas nearby.

The families have been resettled nearby in an Egyptian version of Levittown with running water and telephones. But 80 families are holding out, saying they want more from a government so far reluctant to use brute force.

The Gurna standoff near the famed Valley of the Kings illustrates the challenges facing an authoritarian government that for decades imposed its will on the people, keeping them poor but fed, underemployed but employed, but now seeks to adjust the social contract without sparking widespread unrest. The government has again imposed a solution — one that will change the way hundreds of families live — but is negotiating with those left behind until it finds terms that are acceptable, or at least accepted.

Political analysts say the dynamics here are similar to those all over the country as the government tries to transform a centrally controlled economy. In recent months thousands of workers in bloated state-owned factories have staged wildcat strikes, out of fear that privatization will take their jobs, or demanding pay raises.

Since September there have been dozens of protests relating to economic demands. In each case, the government avoided the heavy-handed tactics it uses to silence political opposition.

“The state told its citizens to expect everything from it,” said Nawal Hassan, a sociologist who has worked closely with the people of Gurna for many years, referring to promises of free education, low-cost food and guaranteed jobs. “The economy was centralized and activities were controlled, and it was the government which was providing people with what they needed. You can’t tell them now, ‘Keep that mentality and manage on your own.’ “

In Gurna — which sits on the tombs of the Nobles and between the Valley of the Kings and the Valley of the Queens, with tombs that date back some 3,500 years — much of the familiar tableau of tourist kitsch and village life has been razed into piles of mud brick rubble.

Egyptian officials say that in Gurna they will finish the task because science and decency are on their side. They are preserving priceless antiquities and moving the villagers to a community with the running water that they lacked in Gurna. They complain that the holdouts are trying to extort the government. Under the plan, every married man receives a two-bedroom house in what is known as New Gurna. But the holdouts are pressing for one house for every son.

“Each family man is asking for a house for himself, and for one for his children,” said Sabry Abdel Aziz, head of the Egyptian Antiquities Sector. “We are not distributing millions here. It is a problem of greediness.”

The government considered having the villagers pay for the new houses with low-cost loans. But officials ultimately decided to give the houses away, part of a broad effort to keep the peace. “The president says you are not allowed to remove anyone without providing him with an alternative he agrees to,” said Muhammad Tayeb, head of the local council for the governate of Luxor. “It is impossible. It is against our humanity to force people out.”

But others see a more pragmatic explanation for the government’s approach. “The bureaucracy is heartless and usually heavy-handed unless it will cause bad publicity abroad or wide-scale popular outbreak of violence or rioting,” said Saad Eddin Ibrahim , a democracy advocate who was jailed in connection with his work monitoring elections.

Mr. Ibrahim said President Hosni Mubarak’s strategy of trying to co-opt rather than confront is rooted in two major riots that shook the country — one in 1977, when President Anwar el-Sadat moved to reduce subsidies on bread and other commodities, and a second in 1986 when policemen rioted because of rumors that their conscription would be extended from three to four years. Dozens died in the police riots.

The lesson learned was that people might not take to the streets in large numbers in support of democracy, but they would cause trouble over pocketbook issues. In Gurna, any hint of civil disturbance could undermine a hub of Egypt’s essential tourist industry in Luxor, so the government has stepped more gently.

Gurna sits at the gateway to famed tombs hand-chiseled deep into the desert floor, including that of Tutankhamen. Mud brick houses two and three stories tall roll out across hills dotted with passageways leading back to the New Kingdom. The people here were said to have looted the tombs and when the income from underground troves dried up they turned to tourists. They set up workshops selling handmade crafts from buildings decorated with cartoonish characters of Pharaonic times. Gurna was a bit of time travel and amusement park rolled into one.

The government first realized in 1948 that the village needed to be moved and after a few aborted attempts, essentially abandoned the initiative until 1994 when a new study concluded that 850 families needed to be moved. That process only recently began. “Our life is here, our business is here,” said Sayed el-Amir, 23, whose family has so far refused to leave. He said the government had offered them three houses, but that the family needed four.

New Gurna has straight roads and row after row of identical one-story villas. Each has a small, gravel covered backyard, space enough for one donkey, or maybe a sheep and a few pigeons. It is clean and middle class and quite alien to the ways of village life.

Critics say they are reminded of what the Soviet Union tried years ago when Moscow forcibly settled nomadic peoples of the Far East. The Soviets said they were helping people live a more civilized life, while stripping them of their traditional ways. In Egypt, the change is nearly as significant for the people of Gurna. Modernity brought them running water but cost them easy access to tourists and, more important, a place to keep the animals they once relied on for food.

“Am I happy? What does it matter?” asked Ahmed Hassan, 51, who made the move in December and managed to crowd his large wooden furniture into the small rooms of the villas. “What can I do? Where can I go? We are not happy. We used to live on tourism, but there are no foreigners here.”

Gurna, more than 300 miles south of Cairo, was perfectly situated for people who made their living on tourism and farming. The biggest complaint about the forced relocation was that it would cost people their livelihoods. To help address that problem, the government built what it called a tourist mall. It looks like a large self-storage facility, with metal sliding gates in front of one-room cubbyholes. It is abandoned, the front gate bent and held closed with large rocks.

Salah Muhammad Omar, 28, lived his entire life up in the hills, running after tourists as a child and later selling them ceramic statues he made with molds in his home. He and his wife, Howeida, live in two rooms with a view of men pulling down his neighbors’ houses. All of their possessions are packed in boxes and laid out on a small single bed. They will move, they said, when they get seven apartments — but the government is offering only one.

“If we stay here it is much better,” he said. “The tourists take pictures of us and give us money.”

Down the hill along a road frequented by air-conditioned tour buses, Tayeh Muhammad Hassan, 67, and his four adult sons, were fuming because, they said, their rights were being violated. They said they had been offered just one house, and were told they could build additional floors on top as the sons married. But Ahmed Hassan, 36, acknowledged that it was not just a matter of what the family saw as its rights. The Hassans wanted a better price.

“If you want to relocate me from my house,” Mr. Hassan said, “you have to give me something better.”

Nada Bakri contributed reporting from Gurna and Beirut.

SHAKER HEIGHTS, Ohio — In a sign of the spreading economic fallout of mortgage foreclosures, several suburbs of Cleveland, one of the nation’s hardest-hit cities, are spending millions of dollars to maintain vacant houses as they try to contain blight and real-estate panic.

David Maxwell for The New York Times
A Home in Shaker Heights, Ohio, is advertised as for sale with no money down.

In suburbs like this one, officials are installing alarms, fixing broken windows and mowing lawns at the vacant houses in hopes of preventing a snowball effect, in which surrounding property values suffer and worried neighbors move away. The officials are also working with financially troubled homeowners to renegotiate debts or, when eviction is unavoidable, to find apartments.

“It’s a tragedy and it’s just beginning,” Mayor Judith H. Rawson of Shaker Heights, a mostly affluent suburb, said of the evictions and vacancies, a problem fueled by a rapid increase in high-interest, subprime loans.

“All those shaky loans are out there, and the foreclosures are coming,” Ms. Rawson said. “Managing the damage to our communities will take years.”

Cuyahoga County, including Cleveland and 58 suburbs, has one of the country’s highest foreclosure rates, and officials say the worst is yet to come. In 1995, the county had 2,500 foreclosures; last year there were 15,000. Officials blame the weak economy and housing market and a rash of subprime loans for the high numbers, and the unusual prevalence of vacant houses.

Foreclosures in Cleveland’s inner ring of suburbs, while still low compared with those in Cleveland itself, have climbed sharply, especially in lower-income neighborhoods that border the city. Hundreds of houses are vacant because they are caught in legal limbo, have been abandoned by distant banks or the owners cannot find buyers.

The suburbs here are among the best organized in their counterattack, experts say, but many suburbs elsewhere in the country have had jumps in foreclosures and are also working to stem the damage.

Outside Atlanta, Gwinnett and DeKalb Counties have mounted antiforeclosure campaigns while several towns south of Chicago are forcing titleholders to fix up empty houses, or repay the government for doing it.

Here in Ohio, there are more than 200 vacant houses in Euclid, a suburb of Cleveland north of here. In the last two years more than 600 houses in Euclid have gone through foreclosure or started the process, many of them the homes of elderly people who refinanced with low two-year teaser rates, then saw their payments grow by 50 percent or more.

Euclid has installed alarm systems in some vacant houses to keep out people hoping to steal lights and other fixtures, drug users and squatters. The city has hired three new building inspectors, bringing the total to nine, to deal with troubled properties and is getting a $1 million loan from the county to cover the costs of rehabilitation, demolition and lawn care at the foreclosed houses. (When the properties are sold, such direct maintenance costs will be recovered through tax assessments.)

The Euclid mayor, Bill Cervenik, said the city, with a population of 53,000, was losing $750,000 a year in property taxes from the empty houses.

At greatest risk in Cleveland’s suburbs are the low- and moderate-income neighborhoods where subprime lending has soared. The practice involves lenders issuing mortgages at high interest rates for people with lower incomes or poor credit ratings, usually involving adjustable rates and sometimes no down payment and no investigation of the borrower’s circumstances.

“What makes the subprime mortgages so devastating from a community perspective is that they’re so concentrated geographically,” said Dan Immergluck, a professor of city planning at the Georgia Institute of Technology .

Rosa Hutchinson Yates, 62, had kept up payments on her tidy two-story house on Chagrin Boulevard in Shaker Heights for 30 years. Now, she may well lose the house because of a disastrous refinancing deal in 2003 that brought her $24,000 in cash but bills she could not pay.

Ms. Yates, who has worked as a beautician and a cocktail waitress, was emotional and confused as she tried to explain what happened. Though she signed the closing documents, she said she did not realize that she was getting an adjustable rate mortgage that did not include taxes and insurance.

In 2006, broke and bewildered, she stopped making payments and the lender started foreclosure proceedings. A Shaker Heights city attorney said it appeared that illegally high fees might have been charged and that the broker had overstated Ms. Yates’s income, raising the possibility of a legal challenge.

Ms. Yates, preparing for the worst, has learned that she can move into a subsidized apartment for retirees. But the thought is devastating.

“When folks pay for a home, they expect to die in it,” she said, breaking into tears.

In a report for Shaker Heights, Mark Duda and William C. Apgar of Harvard University found that expensive refinancing deals had been aggressively “push-marketed” in the city’s less affluent west and south sides, bordering Cleveland. They said that “the rising number of foreclosures threatens to undermine the stability” of those areas.

“The moral outrage,” Ms. Rawson, the mayor, said, “is that subprime lenders have targeted our seniors and African-Americans, people who saved all their lives to get a step up.”

About one-third of the residents in Shaker Heights and Euclid are black.

Early last year, James Rokakis, the Cuyahoga County treasurer, started a countywide foreclosure-prevention program, which pays community groups to educate people about loans and help defaulting borrowers negotiate with lenders.

In the late 1990s, Mr. Rokakis said, the flight of manufacturing jobs was the major cause of rising foreclosures but around 2000, the surge in careless lending began to wreak havoc.

Mr. Rokakis estimated that more than three-fourths of the current foreclosures in Cuyahoga County involved subprime loans, some of them blatantly unwise or dishonestly portrayed to buyers. Only last year did Ohio tighten its laws to require more complete disclosures to borrowers.

With so many homeowners running into trouble, the City of Cleveland has been unable to keep track of the number of vacant houses, said Mark N. Wiseman, director of the county prevention program. He estimates that 10,000 of the city’s 84,000 single-family houses are empty.

Suburbs like Shaker Heights are trying to avoid the experiences of blighted neighborhoods in Cleveland like the one where Barbara Anderson lives. Ms. Anderson, 59, said her block of East 76th Street was fully occupied three years ago, but now about half the houses are empty.

Many of the houses are filled with smelly trash and mattresses used by vagrants. They have been stripped of aluminum siding, appliances, pipes and anything else that scavengers can sell to scrap dealers.

“It stifles you,” Ms. Anderson said of the squalor. “It lowers the value and affects the kind of people who are willing to move here. I’m embarrassed to say I live here.”

Ms. Anderson, who works for the city ombudsman’s office, is president of a street association that is working with a county-financed group, the East Side Organizing Project, to salvage some homes. But so far, she said, “when we try to board the houses up, someone comes and tears the boards down.”

Things are not as bad in the Moreland section of Shaker Heights, but residents are worried and angry all the same. Robert O’Neal, 52, has lived there nearly all his life and, until recently, could not remember a house being empty for more than a month. Now on his block, 4 of the 12 houses are vacant, 3 of them for more than a year. Lost jobs, divorces and predatory loans have all played roles, he said.

“It’s sucking the life out of the neighborhood,” said Mr. O’Neal, the town’s chief probation officer. “These are big empty houses near the Cleveland border, and people start worrying about letting their kids out to play.”

$1-a-year lease not enough to help city ease its money problems

By DANIA AKKAD, Herald Staff Writer, Mar. 23, 2007

Vern Fisher/The Herald

The Monterey Bay Aquarium has leased the portion of Pacific Grove land it sits on for $1 a year since its opening in 1984.

Friday, March 23, 2007

SIX YEARS ago, San Francisco voters rejected Proposition F, which would have severely restricted auto traffic in Golden Gate Park on Saturdays. That year, voters also rejected a measure that called for experimenting with Saturday closings once a new parking garage was opened beneath the Music Concourse.

Proponents of a car-free stretch of JFK Drive on weekends — the portion now is closed on Sundays only — will not take “no” for an answer.

Their determination is understandable. The absence of cars does notably improve the park atmosphere for the throngs of visitors who enjoy cycling, skateboarding, jogging, walking or pushing their young children in strollers.

The Sunday closure, however, does not work for everyone. It does not work for many people with disabilities, who justly complain about their continuing struggles with access. It certainly does not work for many residents of the surrounding neighborhoods, who must deal with the traffic and parking burden.

Lastly, the Sunday closure does not work for the park’s cultural institutions that argue the limited access is holding down attendance.

Supervisor Jake McGoldrick has reintroduced a proposal to extend the restrictions on car traffic through the weekend for a six-month trial period. Last year, Mayor Gavin Newsom vetoed a similar measure, but McGoldrick and other “Healthy Saturdays” advocates insist a new study suggests the objections to the closures are overstated.

As we have said before, it would be eminently unfair to make a civic decision to keep these cultural institutions in the park — as we have done in San Francisco — then take away their ability to remain viable. Perhaps the “Healthy Saturdays” plan could be tweaked to accommodate their objections. But the supervisors must not run roughshod over the concerns of the cultural institutions. Remember, the last word from the voters on Saturday closings was “no.”

This article appeared on page B - 10 of the San Francisco Chronicle

By MARCY GORDON, AP Business Writer; Thursday, March 22, 2007 (03-22) 19:03 PDT WASHINGTON, (AP) –

Charges of blame were flying Thursday for the meltdown of the high-risk mortgage market as pressure mounted for Congress to do something about rising foreclosures among homeowners unable to meet high payments.

“What we’re looking at is a tsunami of foreclosures that is on the horizon,” Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J., declared at a hearing of the Senate Banking Committee. Most heavily affected, he said, will be black and Hispanic homeowners who were pressured into taking out mortgages at rates they cannot afford.

Under fire from lawmakers, federal regulators said they lacked full authority to prevent the crisis spawned during the soaring housing boom of 2003-2005.

Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., the committee’s chairman, laid out what he called a “chronology of regulatory neglect” as banks and other lenders loosened their standards for making riskier mortgage loans during the boom. He later said he plans to convene a special summit of regulators, mortgage lenders, consumer groups and others to work out a plan of relief for vulnerable homeowners.

“Our nation’s financial regulators were supposed to be the cops on the beat, protecting hardworking Americans from unscrupulous financial actors,” Dodd said. “Yet they were spectators for far too long.”

Many mortgage lenders haven’t come under the Federal Reserve’s supervision because their primary regulators are state banking authorities. However, Dodd and others maintain, the central bank does have authority under federal law to exert jurisdiction over those companies and broaden lending regulations to cover them.

Some of the biggest companies in the so-called subprime mortgage market were called to account before the banking panel.

The distress in subprime mortgages — higher-priced home loans for people with tarnished credit or low incomes who are considered greater risks — has roiled financial markets and stoked anxiety that it could spill over into the broader economy.

Company executives said they had tightened their lending practices and eliminated some higher-risk types of mortgages and urged Congress not to rush in and overreact.

“We take the situation very seriously and we’re taking strong steps” to correct problems, testified Brendan McDonagh, the chief executive of HSBC Finance Corp.

With millions of homeowners said to be at risk of losing their homes in coming years, the issue took on an increasingly political complexion Thursday. While a number of politicians, consumer advocates and community activists are clamoring for Congress to act, industry interests and some Republican lawmakers are warning that new restrictions on mortgage lending could choke off credit to those who most need it.

Away from the hearing, Democratic presidential contender Sen. Barack Obama called on Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson to convene a “homeownership preservation summit” bringing together major players for the purpose of stemming the foreclosure tide.

“We cannot sit on the sidelines while increasing numbers of American families face the risk of losing their homes,” the Illinois Democrat said in a letter to Bernanke and Paulson.

Dodd, who also is seeking the party’s presidential nomination, warned at the hearing that some 2.2 million homeowners could lose their homes in the next few years.

Mortgage payments that were 30 or more days past due shot up to a 3 1/2-year high in the final quarter of last year and new foreclosures surged to record levels as borrowers with blemished credit histories had trouble keeping up monthly payments, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association. The late-payment rate for loans classified as subprime jumped to 13.33 percent in the October-December quarter, up from 12.56 percent in the previous prior period and the highest in four years.

Acknowledged Roger Cole, head of the Federal Reserve’s banking supervision division, “I will say that given what we know now, yes, we could have done more sooner.”

Under pointed questioning from Dodd, Cole promised to put in motion a process at the central bank that could lead to a broadening of federal rules governing mortgage lending standards.

A patchwork of federal and state regulatory agencies hold jurisdiction over financial companies, putting many subprime mortgage lenders outside stringent regulation, the regulators said.

New Century Financial Corp., which had been the second-largest high-risk mortgage lender but is now in precarious financial straits, refused Dodd’s invitation to send an executive to testify at the hearing.

Appearing with HSBC’s McDonagh were executives of Countrywide Financial Corp.; WMC Mortgage, which is owned by General Electric Co.; and First Franklin Financial Corp., part of Merrill Lynch & Co.

Another Democratic senator making a presidential bid, Hillary Rodham Clinton, recently proposed requiring lenders to clearly explain mortgage terms to borrowers — especially for loans with initially low “teaser” rates that balloon after a few years.

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On the Net:

Senate Banking Committee:

banking.senate.gov

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2007/03/22/national/w141354D76.DTL