Housing Debate Unfolds in Shadow of a Living Wall

VERNIER, Switzerland — Alexa Magalhaes has no plans to move from the apartment building where she has lived for the last six years, and why should she? As one of the largest such buildings on earth, it provides for just about all her needs, she says.
“I love this building; it’s a little village, you have everything here — school, medical center, families with children,” said Ms. Magalhaes, a woman in her 30s who shares a bright three-and-a-half-room apartment with her young daughter.

Her sentiments are not universally shared.

“It’s a monster,” said Jean Paul Laurent, 53, whose work for the local public utility occasionally brings him to the area. “I’m from a small village, I live in a three-story house, I call that a human scale,” he said. Yet he admitted that tenants of Ms. Magalhaes’s building, known as Le Lignon, after a river in nearby France, praised their apartments as large and bright, with splendid views and many conveniences.

The debate over Le Lignon is pertinent because the behemoth, with its 2,780 apartments, more than 10 million square feet of floor space and about 6,800 tenants, was thrown up four decades ago largely as a response to an acute housing shortage in the region around Geneva, including towns like Vernier. With immigrants streaming into the area every year, it faces a similar housing shortage today.

The question is whether to build another monster project like Le Lignon or to go the more accepted route these days of lower density housing.

If larger cities take pride in the height of their skyscrapers, Vernier, population 34,000, has long boasted about the length of Le Lignon, which at nearly seven-tenths of a mile, was for years thought to be the longest residential building anywhere. There were celebrations to mark the anniversary, and the canton of Geneva, the larger region in which Vernier lies, bestowed landmark status on the huge building.

In point of fact, Le Lignon is not the longest apartment building in the world. That distinction seems to go to one called Bymuren, which snakes 1.5 kilometers, or more than 4,800 feet, just west of Copenhagen; two other apartment buildings, in Vienna and Berlin, are roughly the same size as Le Lignon.

“It was the product of the period after the war, the baby boom, when the region needed to build because of demographic growth, and it had to be done fast,” said Justin McMahon, 34, an artist specializing in murals who grew up in Le Lignon, the son of English parents.

The idea, he said, was derived from the work of Le Corbusier, the Swiss-born French architect famed for his huge projects of affordable housing for the residents of crowded cities. Yet so controversial was the project that some thought it might be temporary housing.

“It was totally economical,” Mr. McMahon said. “Some actually thought it would be destroyed 25 years later.”

Louis Payot was one of the team of architects who designed Le Lignon. Now 89, he has never lived there but has spent the past 50 years in a pleasant chalet he designed on the north shore of Lake Geneva. “The idea was for a place in the country, with apartments extending through the building with views on both sides,” he said.

It was built on what had been a 70-acre farm, and the narrow, wall-like design allowed much of the greenery to be preserved. At the topping out ceremony, showgirls from a Geneva nightclub called Don Quichotte were bused out to dance. If he had the chance, he would build another. “Absolutely,” he said. “It is an epic poem.”

Le Lignon resembles nothing more than an immense wall, 12 to 14 stories high, snaking across a ridge above the Rhone. On one end stand two high-rise towers with additional apartments. Between the building and the river are a shopping center, Protestant and Catholic churches and a cluster of schools. Four huge underground garages provide parking for tenants.

Where Mr. Payot saw epic poetry, others saw bad prose. Almost from the start, upscale Genevans peered down their noses at the monster of Vernier. They called Le Lignon “the rabbit hutch,” and in the 1990s its reputation sank as the number of immigrants living there soared, along with the youth unemployment and crime rates.

Unemployment remains high today and graffiti still abounds, but over the last decade the crime rate has dropped, thanks to increased police protection but also to programs that have put unemployed youths to work painting the garages or putting murals on outdoor wall space. Some young people organize afternoon tea dances for elderly tenants.

To be sure, architects, not only in Switzerland, continue to plan kilometer-sized buildings.

Thierry Apothéloz, 40, a social worker who has been mayor of Vernier for the last eight years, is not overly impressed with plans recently disclosed by Saudi Arabia to build a skyscraper for mixed residential and office use that would be roughly as tall, at one kilometer, or 3,280 feet, as Le Lignon is long.

“It’s not the same; I prefer horizontal,” said Mr. Apothéloz, who for 12 years has shared an apartment with his wife in Le Lignon. “Here you have the impression you are in shared space.”

Adrien Munch, 58, a computer technician who resides in a village near Le Lignon, will have neither. Two or three times a week he jogs along the Rhone past the farm buildings that remained standing on the property when their elephantine neighbor went up. The old farm house, with its clay tile roof and lovely wrought iron balcony, is now a music school; the barn is being restored to accommodate paying guests. An outbuilding is kept by a Portuguese family that has surrounded it with vegetable and flower gardens.

Mr. Munch, asked whether he could imagine living in Le Lignon, replied, with a wave of his hand toward the quaint farm buildings: “Personally, no. I prefer the country.”

Israelis Happy at Home but Glum About Peace

JERUSALEM — With the start of the Jewish New Year at sunset on Wednesday, a traditional time for stock-taking in Israel, the public mood seemed paradoxical: a growing disillusionment with the prospect of Middle East peace yet a marked sense of satisfaction with life here.
That gap, reflected and discussed in news media commentaries, was evident in a survey of Israeli Jews published on Wednesday in the newspaper Yediot Aharonot. Two-thirds of the respondents said there was no chance — ever — of achieving peace with the Palestinians. But asked if Israel was a good place to live, 88 percent said yes.

In an article accompanying the poll results, the survey’s director, Mina Zemach of the Dahaf Institute, was quoted as saying that she could not remember a time when skepticism about the possibility of peace ran so high.

She also noted that in response to another question, 45 percent said they feared for the survival of Israel as a Jewish state. As Sima Kadmon, a political columnist at the newspaper, wrote, “In other words, nearly half of the Jewish public lives with a feeling of existential threat, doesn’t believe there will ever be peace, and despite that, is feeling good.” The poll, in which 500 adults were surveyed by telephone, has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus five percentage points.

The contradiction may partly reflect a momentary sense of relief. For months Israelis were told that September would be catastrophic: the Palestinians would achieve statehood recognition at the United Nations, leaving Israel isolated and under tremendous international and legal pressure. Some spoke of a “diplomatic tsunami,” others of a “train wreck.”

Instead, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu returned from New York on Monday to a country that believed that it had dodged a bullet. The Palestinians did request full United Nations membership through the 15-member Security Council. But not only has the United States promised to veto the bid, Israeli officials also say that the Palestinians may not have the nine votes needed to even prompt such a move.

“It turns out that the tsunami predicted to hit Israel in the month of September went the way of so many other predictions that have been made about the Middle East in recent years,” Moshe Arens, a former defense minister who is on the right of Mr. Netanyahu’s Likud party, wrote in the newspaper Haaretz.

Moreover, the sense over the past two years that President Obama was growing angry with Israel and steering American policy away from its interests subsided last week. The parts of Mr. Obama’s United Nations speech about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict could have been written by any official here. It said nothing about Israeli settlements, the 1967 lines, occupation or Palestinian suffering, focusing instead on Israel’s defense needs.

Avigdor Lieberman, the hawkish foreign minister, said afterward that he would be happy to sign Mr. Obama’s speech “with both hands.”

A Jerusalem Post online poll published on Wednesday showed the turnaround in the public mood about the president. The survey found that 54 percent of Israelis considered Mr. Obama to be pro-Israel compared with 19 percent who said he was pro-Palestinian. While the results could not be directly compared with earlier surveys because the poll was conducted online and was not a telephone survey, the reversal was unmistakable. Four months ago, when The Post asked a similar question in a telephone survey, 12 percent of Israelis considered Mr. Obama to be pro-Israel and 40 percent saw him as pro-Palestinian.

The fact that Mr. Obama’s re-election prospects seem threatened by Republican candidates whose views of the conflict mirror those of the governing Likud party is also much discussed.

Mr. Netanyahu’s aides suggested to reporters that the isolation that Israel was said to be suffering after the attack on its Cairo embassy and Turkey’s expulsion of its ambassador was less than met the eye.

They noted that the statement issued last week by the so-called quartet — the United States, the European Union, Russia and the United Nations — was a far closer reflection of Israeli goals than of Palestinian desires. It called on the two sides to resume negotiations without preconditions, which is Israel’s official policy. The Palestinians say that such talks are pointless without a freeze in Israeli settlements on the land captured in the 1967 war.

The Palestinian leadership is scheduled to meet in the coming days and is expected to reject the quartet’s statement and restate its demand for an end to settlement construction before talks can resume. A recent survey by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research shows that the Palestinian public also has little faith in negotiations.

Both Israelis and Palestinians seem to believe that time is on their side.

The Israeli left continues to warn that such a belief is a dangerous illusion. Haaretz, which serves as a leftist forum, published an editorial with the headline “This new year, the clouds are gathering.”

“Curled up in our justice and our justifications,” it said, “isolated as we never were before, shedding one ally after another, devoid of any hope and vision aside from ensuring the continued growth of West Bank settlements, the ‘state of the Jews’ under the leadership of Netanyahu and Avigdor Lieberman is striding toward a new year that will also not be simple from an objective standpoint: The global economic crisis is not letting up, the Iranian nuclear threat continues to hover over us, the ‘Arab Spring of Nations’ is darkening into a radical Islamist storm, and a hostile Palestinian state is being born, without peace, to the sound of the world’s applause.”

The editorial said the one bright spot was the social and economic protests in Israel over the summer. What began as concern over high prices could turn into a revival of the political left, starting with social issues, the Haaretz editorial argued.

Polling data certainly suggest that the protests have revived the prospects of the much diminished Labor Party, especially under its new leader, Shelly Yachimovich, a former journalist and crusader for economic and social equality.

Several recent polls suggest that if elections were held today Labor would gain the most votes after Likud, and that issues of socioeconomic equality would edge out security concerns.

In Yediot, the commentator Raanan Shaked summed up the feelings of many Israelis after the protests, in which ordinary voices took on a new significance and the issues of war and peace were largely ignored.

“Upon the new year’s arrival,” he wrote, “let’s wish for the pie to be divided into shares that are a little more equal, a little more humane, and mostly, for a change, a little more satisfying.”