[BalaGire]

Dubai

Why exactly is that so horrible again?

[rostpribru]

They should make ugly cities

I bet their subway system is better than Chicago's too!

[Brareevor]

Built on teh backs of slave labour

[i6mbwwdh]

The ruler of Dubai might be a ruthless autocrat but he's at least building his kingdom to last beyond the end of their oil.

[TornadoPD]

Muslims should be content to live in poverty and give us barrels of oil for twenty dollars.

[Druspills]

Originally posted by Oerdin
The ruler of Dubai might be a ruthless autocrat but he's at least building his kingdom to last beyond the end of their oil. How is this going to survive when the oil money runs out? Or is he really building a cool site that future civs will find buried under the sand?

[WhonyGataxott]

How is this going to survive when the oil money runs out?

Tourism

[intisgunkas]

Yeah, I want to vacation in a desert.

[reiruviartugs]

Originally posted by Wezil
Yeah, I want to vacation in a desert. Why not, lots of people want them by the beach.

[SQiTmhuY]

I don't think gambling and show girls will be the next fad in Dubai.

[replrobin]

Spec should take up walking, or bike riding.


Hopefully the risk of turning Dubai into a huge playground pays off for them.

[FLOMOUSLY]

The petals are off this rose. Dubai never actually had much oil or gas of its own so they tried to become the tourism, business, and finance center for the more oil rich parts of the Persian Gulf. The problem is without their own money they mostly financed their building boom with borrowed money and now all those white elephant construction sites are sitting empty while Dubai is supposedly becoming a ghost town. The NYT has a great article on this: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/12/wo...i.html?_r=1&em

Highlights include:

- A lot of the construction is actually substandard and infrastructure hasn't kept pace. The famous "Palm Island" man made peninsula wasn't properly compacted so now the land is sinking breaking water lines, sewer lines, and building foundations.

- Several of the mega buildings don't even have working water any more and in expensive mega hotels you turn on the tap and nothing but cockroaches come out.

- Dubai didn't let people actually immigrate, they just got temperary work visas, so now that thousands are being laid off they have 30 days to find a new job or leave the country. This means much of the 90% of the population which aren't citizens are now leaving making the property crash even worse.

- Dubai also still has debtors prison laws so tons of foreigners are simply leaving rather then going to jail. They're leaving behind massive amounts of unpaid credit card debts, cars that they can't get out of the country, and unpaid mortgages where the property is only worth a fraction of the outstanding loan balance.

- Many of the massive white elephant construction projects have had to stop work because of lack of funds while the city is full of empty skyscrapers. There were never enough people to fill all that office space but the government just kept funneling more and more money into it.

- The Emir has responded by becoming more totalitarian and absolutist declaring it a felony to "harm" Dubai's reputation or to question its economic vitality.

- The airport parking lot is full of abandoned cars as foreigners drive them there and then abandon them rather then go to debtors prison.

- Just last summer Dubai, using government money, opened the world's biggest shopping mall. It's now mostly empty with empty stores and few costumers willing to spend money.

I'm sure things will improve economically for Dubai but the days of spending hundreds of billions of borrowed money in a giant real estate speculation game are pretty much over.

[ultimda horaf]

Like I said they'll bounce back but it looks like the good old days are over and they're coming back to Earth.