Word: boom
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...suburbanites, more than their urban or rural brethren, tend to want to get things fixed. Lakewood, Calif., 22 miles south of downtown Los Angeles, was just another boondock of 5,000 people ten years ago when the boom thundered. A development group poured $200 million into 17,000 homes ($8,000-$11,000) and a big shopping center. As residents took hold, the sense of frustration that came from long-distance county rule and the absence of locally administered services flashed into a new, self-starting energy. Lakewood, with a present population of 75,000, incorporated itself in 1954, sank...
...finished apartment houses, new factories, assembly plants and used-car lots flanks the 13-mile road be tween the airport and town. Hotel space is at such a premium that many a visiting industrialist is glad to find a cot in the bathroom of any rooming house. The new boom town: Algiers, a city once chiefly celebrated in romantic French novels for its hauntingly mysterious Casbah and flyspecked poverty...
Army & Oil. In the space of barely four years, the twin dynamos of nationalist rebellion and oil discovery have produced a button-busting boom that no city in metropolitan France can match. Since 1956, population has doubled, is now approaching 1,000,000. The first whiff of prosperity came when France increased its Algerian army first to 200,000, then to 500,000 men to fight the F.L.N. rebels. Most of the new troops were reservists drawing far higher pay than the ordinary conscript rate, and produced unheard-of business for Algiers' bars, restaurants and shops. And with...
...stores selling radios, refrigerators, household equipment has increased fivefold. They do so well that bank deposits doubled in one year. "Who are the new millionaires in Algiers?" says one government official "Broadly speaking, just about anyone in a small business." Think Big. What started as a war and oil boom is gradually changing into something more permanent. Starting in 1958, under De Gaulle's Constantine Plan to encourage the Algerian economy, dozens of new industries have moved across the Mediterranean to Algiers to take advantage of low government loans (3% interest on up to 40% of the required capital...
...beggars, and seven out of every ten Casbah residents have tuberculosis. What makes the city bustle is its newly moneyed middle class, mostly of French, Corsican, Italian or Spanish descent, though many Arabs have done well too. But there is little of the raffish night life of the typical boom town; Algiers' one luxury nightclub is half empty on week nights. "The Algerian businessman," said one French official, "may keep a rakish sports car and luxurious villa on the Riviera, but in Algiers he's middle class, respectable, and rather mean...