Word: downtowners
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Hugo Chavez was being re-elected to a second six-year term as Venezuela's President last December, I had a long talk with National Assembly Deputy and constitutional lawyer Carlos Escarra inside the legislature's colonial-era chamber in downtown Caracas. Escarra, a close Chavez ally, is a driving force behind the campaign to eliminate presidential term limits in Venezuela - a reform that Chavez's critics fear would let him rule for life and create a left-wing dictatorship...
First come the billboards. As you head north, away from downtown Denver, they flip by like flash cards, advertising houses by Lennar, KB Home and Richmond American, from the $100s, the $170s, the low $300s. What they don't tell you is that should you wander into one of the new subdivisions popping up from the prairie, you're likely to be offered tens of thousands of dollars in incentives to buy, and to buy now. At a recent conference of Colorado builders and real estate agents, one speaker counseled salespeople to stop acting so desperate. "It sends the signal...
Green Valley Ranch, to the east of downtown Denver, is one neighborhood having a particularly tough time. Houses are still going up in the massive multiphase development, but within the new construction lurk bus benches advertising foreclosure assistance. Many of the people who have run into difficulty are first-time buyers who jumped into mortgages they couldn't afford in the long term. Now, as they endure the heart-wrenching saga of slowly losing their homes, the whole neighborhood suffers: according to a study by Dan Immergluck at the Georgia Institute of Technology, a house loses 1% of its value...
...Francisville, Louisiana, a sleepy, Spanish moss-draped town of 1,800 in the heart of what tourism officials have dubbed Plantation Country, was well out of strike range when Hurricane Katrina devastated much of the state two years ago. Its downtown is a dense collection of graceful buildings, many dating back to the 18th century, which are still as carefully preserved and nurtured as the town's air of Old South gentility. But beginning this week St. Francisville finds itself at the center of a media storm, playing host to a controversial trial over the deaths of 35 nursing home...
...Hizballah launched a campaign to topple the current American-supported Lebanese government, which it accuses of collaborating with Israel to destroy Hizballah's existence as a state within the Lebanese state. But the Hizballah-led opposition campaign has stalled - they've been stuck in protest tent camps in downtown Beirut for the last eight months - in part because many Lebanese resent the fact that Hizballah unilaterally sparked a war that ended with almost 2,000 dead and billions of dollars in damage...