The Wall Street Journal-20080111-What If You Built An Island Paradise And No One Came-- Maldives Had High Hopes To Escape Rising Tides- Hulhumale-s Vacant Shores
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What If You Built An Island Paradise And No One Came?; Maldives Had High Hopes To Escape Rising Tides; Hulhumale's Vacant Shores
HULHUMALE, Maldives -- With an average altitude of just over three feet, this tiny island nation faces an imminent threat from rising sea levels caused by global warming. Luckily, it has a lifeboat: Technocrats have built a man-made island more than six feet high.
On paper, it's a tropical paradise. Capable of housing as many as 150,000 of the nation's 369,000 residents, Hulhumale has a mosque, a school, a small office building and several hundred apartments. Planners even imported cows -- the only ones in the Maldives -- to make fertilizer.
According to the master plan, there will also be an arts center, a luxury hotel and marina, a leafy civic district and a big hospital to complement the Maldives' famous beachside bungalows and fancy resorts. The Muslim nation's plans even include an alcohol-free entertainment zone with a "Rard Rock Cafe."
But now Maldives officials are facing an uneasy truth: Just because you build it doesn't mean that people will come.
Much of the island remains an empty expanse of gravel lots and wan palm trees despite government efforts to relocate several thousand people here from Male, the island capital just a couple of miles away.
The new roads -- some wide enough to handle four lanes of traffic -- are often untraveled except by government vehicles and Maldivian youths who tear around on motorcycles.
One afternoon recently, a few Bangladeshi construction workers ambled across a weedy empty lot, heading nowhere in particular. Nearby was a discarded shoe and graffiti saying, "Vengeance was here." At the new fish market along Hulhumale's seaside, winds ripped through the empty open-air structure and the restrooms were trashed. One Maldivian distributor sells frozen fish at the site for several hours in the afternoon, but doesn't attract many buyers.
"I find it quite relaxing, actually," said 25-year-old Ahmed Hashim, who staffs the stall. He then abandoned it, walking off into the distance.
Some residents, like Mohamed Sodiq, 40, are already looking to move away. He came to Hulhumale a couple of years ago to work as a policeman, but he says the rents are high -- and the life is boring. There are no volleyball courts, he says, and he likes volleyball. "If I can get a plot on Male, I'll move there," says Mr. Sodiq, who has been scanning newspaper ads for Male apartments, but to no avail. "We can all have our hopes and dreams," says Mahjoob Shujau, a 39-year-old Maldivian civil servant who heads the Hulhumale Development Corp., which is in charge of managing Asia's newest city. But for now, he says, Hulhumale, despite a population of roughly 5,000, is simply "not there."
Many residents of Male say the idea of Hulhumale is a good one given the atrocious conditions in the capital.
It has more than 100,000 people in a space that can be crossed on foot in 25 minutes. Rents for two-bedroom apartments top $9,000 a year, despite annual per capita incomes of $4,000. Imported sports cars jam the narrow streets, even though it's rarely possible to drive faster than 20 miles per hour. Global warming, meanwhile, has many people fearful that the low-lying city will be swamped by rising tides in a matter of years.
Problem is, many people don't want to leave. Down a 4-foot-wide alley off Narrow Land Street on Male, 61-year-old Abdul Aziz and nine other relatives live in a 730-square-foot dwelling with corrugated tin roofs. A discarded toilet tank and cement buckets litter the space outside his door.
"I want to stay here -- it's the capital city," he says. Besides, with Hulhumale, "people are just being shifted from one island to another -- it's not a long-term solution."
Mohamed Ishan Saeed, an architect who helped design some of Hulhumale's apartment blocks, also has turned against the project, especially after disagreeing with the island's administrators over design elements.
Today, he describes the idea of engineering a whole new town as "moronic" and refers to the Hulhumale's hulking apartment blocks as "a prison" because they don't have enough community space. When he thinks of the island, he says, "it's just kind of sick, because it's like, 'What the hell is this?'"
Hulhumale's supporters say the project is still in its early days. They note that a local development company is signed up to build one hotel and private developers are expected to build oceanfront residences.
Still, even Mr. Shujau, the government's administrator of the projects, seems discouraged. He studied in Australia before returning to the Maldives to help solve its infrastructure issues. "It was good fun" at first, he says. But now, "our honeymoon period is over."
The government is now short of funds for construction. It used up loads of cash -- including much of a $30 million development package -- to help residents buy the first apartments and now must wait for people to repay their loans, which could take 20 years or more. "For us, that's a lot of money," Mr. Shujau says. Meanwhile, absentee landlords have bought many of the apartments and jacked up rents.
It has also been difficult to attract investors to one of the ugliest places in an island nation full of beautiful ones. Despite all the available land in Hulhumale, Holiday Inn is planning to open a 120-room hotel in late 2008 -- in Male. A spokesman for Holiday Inn says Male is attractive because it is close to the main airport (as is Hulhumale). Holiday Inn is "unlikely" to consider Hulhumale in the future, he says.
Not everyone dislikes Hulhumale. Abdul Samad, a 52-year-old fish cleaner at the Male seafood market, recalls a magical three months at Hulhumale after he married a woman who lived there. They spent time in the few local cafes and occasionally went to the beach, he says. But the two were divorced, and he quickly found a new wife in Male. Still, he'd like to go back. "Can you please find me a place there?" he asked as he gutted a plump tuna.
Even if Hulhumale does find a way to fulfill its planners' ambitions, it's unclear how long it will survive. Although it is being built on higher ground to outlast Male as the tides rise, it, too, is vulnerable. Mr. Shujau says that if worst-case scenarios come to pass, Hulhumale itself could be submerged by 2050.
