IN AND OUT OF CONTROL

While the everyday space of the city becomes increasingly paralyzed with security, military and surveillance apparatuses, Beirut's real-estate market is being increasingly fluidified. Through different measures, state institutions and policies are catering to neoliberalism's changing needs, but also to its immediate and unchanging need for malleability (that which allows it to reabsorb its failures). Planning strategies are devised with an interpretable flexibility, providing the leeway needed to regulate and organize the development of the city according to the shifting interests of an elite few. By deliberately and strategically creating ambiguity where it is most profitable, these measures allow for the space of neoliberalism to come forth. 

 

COMPLICITY OF THE STATE

Despite common belief and the image it sometimes creates of itself, the state is not impotent nor absent. It is intentionally designing its own failure by being directly complicit and facilitating the work of private agencies, providing subsidies, legal exemptions and facilities, deliberately fostering a particular form of development. 

 

• Building and zoning regulations for entire cities and neighborhoods is delegated to private actors.

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• Real-estate developers are entitled to adjust the price of land to its market rate in 1992 rather than the price at which they had purchased the lot, hence reducing considerably the taxes they have to pay on the profit they make.

 

• IDAL, the Investment and Development Authority in Lebanon, was established by the Hariri government in 1994 with the aim of promoting investments in the country. Today, IDAL’s mandate is to offer incentives and tax-cuts (up to 100 %) to investors whose projects fulfill its requirements, authorized to autonomously issue required licenses and permits, as long as projects abide by the Lebanese building law.

 

• 1995 - Regulation (Law 402/1995) allows hotel developers to double exploitation ratios dictated by urban regulations. This is accompanied by tax alleviations on these developments, further encouraging investments in this sector.​

 

• Profits made by joint-stock and limited liability companies from residential real estate developments are taxed at a rate 50% less than regular revenues. 

 

• Holding companies are exempted from paying income taxes.

 

• Easing the acquisition of property for non-nationals (Law 296/2001).

 

• Facilitating the ways in which non-nationals can establish companies either in the form of holdings (e.g. Law 772/2006) or joint-stock companies (through IDAL, Law 771/2006).

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