* Is Replacing Old Lebanese Houses With High Rise Buildings Really Such A Bad Thing?

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..