Overall, it's a fairly bleak picture. Although the streets of Beirut showcase a gross display of wealth in the form of ubiquitous Mercedes and cell phones, more than a quarter of Lebanon's population, around one million people, currently live below the poverty line, according to 1998 UN statistics.
Proponents of Solidere say it shouldn't be criticized too harshly, given that it has already done hundreds of millions of dollars of reconstruction that neither the government nor the private landowners could have carried out on their own. Some speculate that Solidere's homogenous rebuilding prevented what could have been a mishmash of single buildings going up one at a time. "I really like Solidere-what they did was like magic-before, it looked like a field of war, like Vietnam," said artist Gharda Saghieh, 40, who lived in a suburb of Beirut with her two children during the war. Saghieh was hired by Solidere to paint some murals to cover the work-in-progress. "I wanted to be present in this reconstruction site because to me it was a miracle, a superhuman effort in this country that still has an unfinished highway from the 80's." Even Paul Salem thinks that the Solidere project will ultimately be a viable one. "It may take 20-30 years to fill (the buildings created by) Solidere but it is a stunningly beautiful project," he said. Solidere has recently (Daily Star article 12.7.99) been forced to drop retail rental prices from $600-800 to around $200 a square meter. Which is still overpriced for the current market, but, "When business is moving, people will pay," said Salem. He added that the final success of Solidere would be predicated on a lasting peace in the region with the Israelis.
Still exchanging fire with Israel, Lebanon suffered a bombed power station in June and a minor bombardment near the Syrian border in July, in addition to several skirmishes this fall. "If there is real peace, Beirut and the downtown district will be a large beneficiary," said Salem. But the company itself has no cash to spare. Solidere's 1998 revenues were only one third of the company's target of 180 million, and Merrill Lynch estimated that year-end profits for 1999 will be down as low as $32 million (Daily Star 12.7.99). "I thought that Solidere was going to prosper," said Renee Ghattas, a fifty-something professor of accounting and finance at the Lebanese American University of Beirut. When the war ended in 1992, Ghattas was one of many downtown owners who faced a painful dilemma: either give up the devastated building she and her sisters owned or rebuild it themselves. Ghattas believed that Solidere was going to provide her with a financially secure future in exchange for her family home. "Since we did not have money to rebuild it ourselves, I thought that Solidere was the best deal. I had faith," she said. "It was a beautiful small building on a corner, done in traditional Arabic style."
Today Ghattas feels cheated of her heritage. "We got 125 thousand dollars in shares which was peanuts for this type of building. "Nonetheless, Ghattas bought some shares with her own money, thinking that she was further investing in her future. "I hoped that being a shareholder was going to make us wealthier but now the shares are worthless," she said. Pragmatically, Ghattas said, "I don't want to sell now--it is not a question of faith but of not losing more money."