Word: rios
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...narrow-gauge railway, wood-burning and rachitic, is the regular transport over the 1,000 miles between Rio and the boomtown of Anapolis, in Goiaz (see map). It takes four days & nights by rail to reach Anapolis, gateway to the rich backlands, and longer if the trip is made by road. But from the lush lowlands of the north and the coffee fazendas to the south, 50,000 Brazilians a year are passing through muddy, roughhewn Anapolis in search of new homes and new times, just as U.S. pioneers a century ago left the Atlantic coast and headed west...
...knows all about their lack of good roads and railways. A leader who wants to know how a man gets along with his neighbors,, how his crops are coming, he calls by first name many of the 15,000 settlers in the Colonia. Last week he was in Rio seeking money for the Colonia, for the Government had paid not a cruzeiro of the funds appropriated for it for this year...
...reason for this strange state of affairs is that the empty Copacabana apartments, like many others in the great modern buildings that line Rio's beaches and stalk its hillsides (TIME, Feb. 25, 1946), are owned by speculators who have no intention of becoming landlords. Tax laws are on the side of the speculator. The only real-estate tax an owner pays is 10% on rental value, established after an apartment is completed-and a stepladder in an entrance hall is evidence enough that the building is not yet done...
...obvious way to find an apartment is to call a real-estate agent-anywhere but in Rio, that is. Agents here can't find apartments and they firmly refuse new business. So you read advertisements, spot something, find a cab-if you can-and speed to it. After weeks of that sort of searching you become gun-shy. Why? Because "furnished" apartments are that in name only...
...apartments. The cheapest was offered at $225 and the most expensive at $425-four rooms. Often there was a demand for "key money," say $200, to speed negotiations. We saw only two apartments that had no dirty dishes in the sink. It was not that the maids were lazy. Rio as usual was suffering from a falta d'agua (water shortage). All but two had a bathtub of rusty water with a saucepan nearby for a dipper. Water ran briefly only at morning & night...