Kind of Blue: In Asia, Elite Offices Show Off With Icy Temperatures

By GEOFFREY A. FOWLER Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL August 24, 2005; Page B1

Question of the Day: How is the temperature in your office?

It is a steamy 91 degrees here in Hong Kong, but conference organizer Patricia Shiu is sitting next to a portable heater inside her modern office tower.

"It is unnaturally cold here," Ms. Shiu says of her office, which falls to a brisk 64 degrees in the summer. Every morning, the 29-year-old dons a black wool sweater, but it's never enough to protect her from the floor vents shooting up frigid air. Within an hour, she switches on the heater under her desk. "I don't think I'm a weak person," she says by way of apology.

Her colleagues would agree. They use rulers to try to hit a button deep inside the vent to close it. (Never mind that it just increases the air flow from other vents onto their colleagues.) If that fails, they drink hot soup and tea, or do yoga in the bathroom to stay warm. Their company has run out of the red corporate sweaters it sold for about $6.50, which many employees use as office sweaters.

Parts of tropical Asia are extraordinarily humid. Air conditioning helps abate the mold that grows on drapes, shoes and just about everything else that doesn't move.

But mostly, frosty air conditioning is a way for businesses and building owners to show that they're ahead of the curve on comfort. In ostentatious Asian cities, bosses like to send out the message: We are so luxurious, we're arctic.

Studies have found that 72 to 78 degrees is the optimal range of "thermal comfort" for humans indoors. But around sweltering Asia, buildings blast employees to temperatures as low as a goose-pimply 60 degrees. Cinemas and restaurants even rent out shawls to customers rather than turn down the air conditioning when it becomes fashionably, but uncomfortably, cold.

Hong Kong is just about the world's coldest city -- indoors, that is. A study by one university found that most offices here average between 70 and 72 degrees. Nightly, bespectacled workers who step from frigid lobbies into the city's humid bath find themselves temporarily blinded by a scrim of fog on their lenses.

So, Ms. Shiu and others here joined a resistance movement. It was given a voice this summer by groups such as Friends of the Earth, which contends that all that air conditioning is terrible for the environment, as the units release tons of excess carbon dioxide into the air through the electricity used. With the help of 400 "thermal crime" reporters, the group compiled a name-and-shame list of the city's coldest places. It includes the 66-degree offices of the city's tourism board. One travel guide warns visitors that riding in public buses could turn fingers blue.

Hoping to foment a revolution among Asia's office ladies, or young female workers, FOE calls the excessive air conditioning sexist. Change-resistant, tie-clad men often control offices, it says, and aren't bothered by the chill. Women, on the other hand, tend to wear lighter clothing in the summer. "We wear small dresses, so almost every office lady has an office jacket," says Mona Lim, a 31-year-old real-estate developer. "Usually, the jacket is an ugly one," she adds. Hers, a blazer messed up by a tailor, never leaves the office.

Traditionally, it seems, men have taken air conditioning very seriously. Lee Kuan Yew, founder of modern Singapore, once suggested that without air conditioning, his hermetically sealed city-state wouldn't have risen up from a swamp.

In Japan, the government was worried that suit-and-tie-clad Japanese businessmen would balk at the order in June to set thermometers at 82 degrees to save energy. To prod them, Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi has adopted a Miami look, with an untucked blue-linen shirt and white slacks, telling his countrymen to dress in so-called Cool Biz style.

Syed Ahmed, a manager for Nissan Motor in Tokyo, loves the Cool Biz look, but had to buy a new retro wardrobe. "It reminds me of the 1940s movies where you had offices with fans instead of air conditioning, and paperweights everywhere to keep papers from flying," he says, wearing a short-sleeve shirt and a sensible pair of cotton trousers.

Some 45% of Japanese businessmen went without ties and jackets this summer, according to a survey by the Hakuhodo Institute of Life and Living. But it isn't easy for the formal Japanese to kick the dress-up habit. "When you are meeting with somebody from outside, you don't know which camp he is in," admits Mr. Ahmed. "So people still want to play it safe and wear a tie."

Back in Hong Kong, hedge-fund operations manager Genevieve Verman muses that building managers must think the first blast of air conditioning in the morning makes employees think, "Aaahhh, work is a great place to be." They hope it will persuade staffers to stay in and work during lunch, she says.

Wrong! As far as the 34-year-old Hong Kong resident is concerned, "I love being blasted with hot air on the way out."

In the slightly uncomfortable 82-degree offices of Hong Kong's FOE, organizer Agnes Chen is trying to keep the resistance movement from boiling over. Since it launched the thermal crackdown, FOE has received many technical inquiries from building managers. The problem: They don't know how to adjust the climate controls.

Write to Geoffrey A. Fowler at geoffrey.fowler@wsj.com

Google Gets Better. What's Up With That?

August 25, 2005

EVER heard the old joke about the two psychiatrists who pass in a hallway? One says, "Hello there." The other thinks, "I wonder what he meant by that?"

In high-tech circles, that's pretty much what people are saying about Google these days. If you hadn't noticed, Google is no longer just an Internet search tool; it's now a full-blown software company. It develops elegant, efficient software programs - and then gives them away. In today's culture of cynicism, such generosity and software excellence seems highly suspicious; surely it's all a smokescreen for a darker, larger plot to suck us all in. What, exactly, is Google up to?

The mystery only intensified this week, as Google announced two more free software tools for Windows: a new version of Google Desktop Search and a free instant-messaging program called Google Talk. ( http://talk.google.com/)

The original version of Desktop Search, which Google unleashed last fall, brought the speed and effortlessness of Google's Internet search to your own PC. You'd type a few letters, and in a fraction of a second, you'd be looking at a complete list of files that included your search term - even if that term appeared inside the body of a document. It could even search e-mail, chat-session transcripts and the contents of Web pages you'd seen.

Google Desktop 1.0 certainly blew away Windows' own built-in search tool, which operates with all the speed of an anesthetized slug. But it was limited in three ways.

First, you had to operate it from within your Web browser, limiting its convenience. Second, because it could call up Web pages, e-mail messages and chat transcripts, Google Desktop alarmed people who, ahem, had something to hide from bosses or spouses. And finally, it could see inside only a limited number of document types. For example, it couldn't search PDF files, Web sites visited with any browser except Internet Explorer, or e-mail messages except those in Outlook or Outlook Express.

VERSION 2 , now available at google.com in what's technically in a public beta test version, attacks all of these drawbacks with a vengeance. In Version 2, you can begin a search with a keystroke or by clicking in the search box that's always on the screen. A pop-up menu of search results appears as you begin to type and narrows itself with each additional keystroke. When you see the item you want, you can open it by clicking or by walking up the list with the arrow keys and pressing Enter.

In other words, you can now find and open a certain program, document or control panel entirely from the keyboard, with blazing speed and simplicity. This is old news to Mac fans, of course; the Spotlight feature in Mac OS X 10.4 works the same way. But for Windows XP and 2000 veterans, getting such an omniscient, speedy search feature free is truly liberating. (Microsoft plans something similar for the next version of Windows, due at the end of 2006.)

Google has also beefed up your privacy options. You can omit search categories like secure Web sites (banking sites, for example), password-protected Microsoft Office files, and so on, and you can even flag individual files so that they'll never appear in the search results again.

Finally, the program now recognizes many more document types: e-mail from Gmail, Outlook, Outlook Express, Netscape Mail, Thunderbird and Mozilla Mail; chat transcripts from AOL or MSN Messenger; Web pages you've visited using Internet Explorer, Firefox, Netscape or Mozilla; PDF files; and your Outlook calendar and address book. (And speaking of Outlook, Google Desktop now installs its own search bar right into Outlook, meaning that you can search your e-mail collection in the blink of a cursor.) The company expects to add more kinds of files to this list, thanks to a public plug-in protocol it has published online.

Yet believe it or not, the little search box is the last thing you'll notice when you install Google Desktop. The first thing you'll see is the Sidebar, a column of rectangular panels hugging the right edge of your screen. Each is a window onto a different kind of real-time information from the Internet.

Some are ho-hum, like your latest incoming Gmail and Outlook e-mail, news, stock and weather tickers. Others are refreshingly quirky: the Photos panel shows a continuous, two-inch-tall slideshow of pictures from your own collection, and the surprisingly useful Scratch Pad is a blank box where you can type casual notes throughout your workday (they're saved automatically). Each panel expands horizontally, drawer-like, to reveal more details when clicked.

The Sidebar is about as clean-looking as anyone could make it, but it's still a lot of clutter in a very small space, especially if you add new panels as they become available. On the other hand, you can tidy things up quite a bit: drag your Sidebar panels into a different order, hide the ones you don't use, or collapse them into one-line summaries.

Once again, Google isn't the first company to dream up a modular, Internet-connected suite of miniprograms; the Sidebar is a lot like Mac OS X's Dashboard or the shareware programs Desktop X and Konfabulator. But never mind that; you can't keep a good idea down, and this is a good one indeed.

Google's second revelation this week, Google Talk, lets you communicate with your buddies either by typing or, if your PC has a microphone and speaker, by speaking. As long as you and your conversation partner are at Windows computers, you can converse with spectacular sound quality.

Now, Google Talk 1.0 is probably the most stripped-down chat program on earth. No conference calling, video chats or direct person-to-person file transfers. (Features like these are common in rivals like Skype, iChat and the messenger programs from AOL, MSN and Yahoo.) So what, exactly, is Google trying to prove here?

Its mission, in fact, is far grander. Google Talk aims to end the ridiculous era of proprietary chat networks. At the moment, AOL, MSN and Yahoo each maintain separate, incompatible networks. The big boys each want to be alone in the sandbox, and the losers are their customers.

Google Talk, however, is based on an open, published standard that the company is making available to all. Already, Google Talk communicates with popular chat programs like iChat, Trillian, Adium, Psi and GAIM, but that's just the beginning. Google is making overtures to Yahoo, AOL and Microsoft about making their chat programs compatible; EarthLink has already agreed to join the federation; and Google is also inviting the makers of games, collaboration tools and even cellphones to join in what it hopes will one day be a grand, unified chat network.

In the meantime, Google Talk is significant for another reason: it requires a Gmail account. (Gmail is Google's free, Web-based e-mail service, whose two most famous aspects are its vast capacity - over two gigabytes of storage for each account - and the ads that appear, in small type, off to the right side of each message you read. The ads are computer-matched to keywords in the body of the message, which disturbs some privacy advocates.)

Until now, Gmail accounts were available by invitation only. Google let the service spread gradually and virally, giving each existing member a few additional invitations to extend. At one point, people were actually selling these invitations on eBay.

As of yesterday, however, all that has changed. Now anyone can get a Gmail account - and can therefore use Google Talk. But to prevent spammers and other abusers from snapping up Gmail accounts by the thousands, Google has designed a clever safeguard: when you apply for a Gmail account, you must provide a cellphone number.

Google sends a code to your phone, which you use to complete the registration. (Actually, you don't have to own a cellphone; you just have to know somebody with a cellphone. They can get the code for you, because each cellphone number is good for a number of registrations - just not hundreds of them.)

In a single week, then, Google, the software company, addressed deficiencies in Windows, tried to create a grand unified chat and voice network, and opened its clean, capable, capacious e-mail system to all comers. All of this software is beautifully done, quick to download and fun to use - not to mention free and (apart from the Gmail service) entirely free of ads and come-ons.

Wish they'd cut it out. Trying to figure out what this company's really up to is enough to drive you crazy.

E-mail: Pogue@nytimes.com

Settling for the Upper East Side

New York Times August 14, 2005

By TERI KARUSH ROGERS

TO some, the Upper East Side is clean, prosperous and endowed with an enviable service culture that lubricates the lives of busy residents. To others, it is staid and prissy, the home of an uptight, white-collar ruling class.

But it's also a comparative bargain, and that singular fact, aided by more plentiful inventory, is luring those who would prefer to live elsewhere.

It's an odd concept to those who have lived in New York for more than a minute. Less than a generation ago, the Upper East Side was anything but a backup choice.

"For many years, the Upper East Side for most New Yorkers was really the best option, almost the only option," said Hall F. Willkie, the president of Brown Harris Stevens. "That, or certain parts of the West Side. That was true if you were buying something at the high end or if you were a young person coming in for the first time to New York. It was considered safe, and the place to be."

The change in perception, and in prices, is striking.

"I think the Upper East Side right now is undervalued," said Daniela Kunen, a managing director with Prudential Douglas Elliman.

Like many other brokers and buyers interviewed for this article, Ms. Kunen estimated that a dollar goes 20 to 25 percent further there than downtown or on the Upper West Side.

In some cases, that may be an understatement, according to numbers provided by Miller Samuel, a Manhattan real estate appraiser. As of June 30, the median price of a two-bedroom apartment on the Upper East Side was $1.13 million, compared with $1.34 million on the Upper West Side, $1.41 million in Greenwich Village, and $1.975 million in the SoHo and TriBeCa area.
Apartments have appreciated much less on the Upper East Side. From 2000 to 2005, the median price on a two-bedroom apartment there rose by 43.1 percent, compared with 76.9 percent in Greenwich Village, 79.5 percent in SoHo-TriBeCa, and 91.4 percent on the Upper West Side, according to Miller Samuel.

And that doesn't just pertain to the high-rise buildings east of Third Avenue. Even the grandes dames lining Fifth and Park Avenues lagged: over the same period, the median price of a two-bedroom co-op there rose by 36.3 percent, compared with 61.4 percent on Central Park West.
That could be in part because the Upper East Side is growing off a higher base than other neighborhoods that used to be considered cheap.

"It's sort of like comparing an emerging market stock against a Dow Jones industrial, where there's more inherent risk but greater return," said Jonathan J. Miller, president of Miller Samuel.

Now that the Upper East Side is looking like a bargain, it is starting to draw people who would have once considered TriBeCa or SoHo.

"The downtown loft market particularly fed off buyers that would have looked at the Upper East and West Sides," Mr. Miller said. "But now as price-per-square-foot metrics become more even, some of the flow has gone the other way."

He noted that a more diverse housing mix may explain some of the pricing disparity: for example, more two-bedrooms on the Upper East Side are co-ops of the 1950's and 60's white-brick vintage, while downtown, more two-bedrooms are located in pricey new condo buildings.
But value-savvy buyers aren't necessarily alighting with a bounce in their step.

"I really didn't want to live up there," said Lori K. Schwartz, 36, a consumer products marketer who wanted to remain near Gramercy Park, where she rented a studio. "I tend to go out more downtown, and honestly it wasn't that hip of a neighborhood."

Her search for a one-bedroom under $500,000 proved predictably fruitless below 23rd Street, said her broker, Christine Miller Martin of Warburg Realty Partnership. "Everyone starts out going downtown, but you can't really get a decent one-bedroom for under $700,000," she said.

"On the Upper East Side, you can find a comparable apartment in the half-million-dollar range. If you're not somebody who needs to be right next to the hip, happening restaurant and bar, the Upper East Side makes a lot of sense."

In June, Ms. Schwartz moved into the one-bedroom apartment she bought for $450,000 on 79th Street between Second and Third Avenues. "I love the fact that I'm near the park," she said. "To have that is key. The downside is I have to take cabs when I'm going out. But over all it's nice, it's pleasant, it's clean, convenient. I can see myself staying for a decent amount of time."

While SoHo, TriBeCa and the Village may be hip, the Upper East Side offers more substantial and varied inventory. At the end of July, the Corcoran Group listed 1,421 apartments for sale on the Upper East Side from 59th to 110th Streets, compared with 906 on the Upper West Side from 59th to 125th, 225 in Chelsea, 141 in TriBeCa and 115 in the West Village.

"You're able to choose from a much wider variety of buildings," said Michele Kleier, president and chairwoman of Gumley Haft Kleier. Like other brokers, she suggested that the area's classic strengths - schools, parks, playgrounds, services, cleanliness and safety - more than compensate for its slight heft on the hipness scale. "It's almost like the little black dress of real estate; it's always in style, it's always elegant, it's always appropriate," she said.

Of course, not every new arrival is willing to trade flip-flops for Ferragamos.

"The first six months, I was going nuts," said Jennifer S. Lee, 36, an architect who moved from Gramercy Park to 76th Street near Lexington Avenue. "I felt like I had to dress a lot less casually, No. 1, and much more conservatively."

It was one of several adjustments for Ms. Lee, who told a familiar tale of choosing the Upper East Side by default. In the fall of 2003, she and her husband began looking downtown for a two-bedroom under $750,000. The pair quickly downgraded their expectations from prewar to postwar, which led them uptown to the white-brick buildings east of Lexington Avenue.

"Every time I went up there it was very homogeneous," said Ms. Lee, who is from Hong Kong and is married to a Filipino. "That kind of scared us a little bit. It was such a big difference. But the park is there."

A few months later, in the midst of an escalating market, they entered into a contract to sell their apartment. Their broker, Judith Thorn, an executive vice president at Warburg Realty, showed them a 1,400-square-foot apartment in a postwar doorman building on East 76th Street that was only slightly over their budget.

"I felt completely out of place," Ms. Lee said of her early months in the neighborhood. "I did feel like everybody was white, whereas downtown, it was really a nonissue. I still feel the difference but I've learned how to live with it." Out with her daughter, Chloe, now 2, she said, people occasionally mistook her for a hired caregiver, "especially when I wasn't as dressed up and not wearing a wedding ring."

"So here I was a professional in my mid-30's with an Ivy League education, and everyone thought I was a nanny," she said.

Though they paid less for an apartment than they would have downtown, Ms. Lee and her husband encountered another form of sticker shock. "It's at least 10 percent more expensive up here for laundry, for the corner Chinese restaurant, down to the nail salon. But the services are much better. I think they are more used to the people expecting the service. Everyone delivers."

Ms. Lee and her husband are far from alone in choosing space first, neighborhood second.
Two summers ago, Renee Litvak, a 29-year-old endodontist, and her husband began looking for a new three-bedroom condo on the Upper West Side. "Prices went up on the Upper West Side by 50 percent, and on the Upper East Side, 30 percent" that first year, Dr. Litvak said. They watched as one apartment they had rejected on Riverside Drive was flipped for 50 percent more a year later.

On the advice of their broker, Ms. Kunen of Prudential Douglas Elliman (who also happens to be Dr. Litvak's mother), the pair turned to the Upper East Side. Though competition was still intense, "it was certainly obvious there was more available and you certainly got more space for the money," Dr. Litvak said. They quickly found a three-bedroom, three-bath, four-year-old condo at 78th Street and Third Avenue, where they will move later this summer from their rental at West End Avenue and 63rd Street. Without raising their budget, "we were able to increase the size of our apartment by about 30 percent," Dr. Litvak said. Though it was not their first choice, they are hopeful about the neighborhood.

"We perceive our neighborhood to be young families, lots of good restaurants, lots of amenities," she said, drawing a comparison with the Upper West Side. "Third Avenue going east, there's lots of families and restaurants. If you go west toward Fifth Avenue, it gets desolate and deserted at night."

While many reluctant settlers gravitate toward the East 60's and 70's between First and Third Avenues, others venture farther north or east.

Mitchell Brown, a 52-year-old sales agent with Bellmarc, sold his home in Muttontown, on Long Island, last year. A native Upper West Sider, he intended to buy a one-bedroom there, near the stables at Claremont Riding Academy on West 89th Street, where he rides twice a week.

"When I was a kid living on the West Side, it was always a more bohemian, more intellectual kind of place," Mr. Brown said. But he couldn't find what he wanted in his price range. "When my broker said to go to the Upper East Side, I said, 'No, it's more conservative, less artsy.' " Then he fell for a 28th-floor, 820-square-foot condo with a 12-by-12-foot terrace on 80th Street near First Avenue.

His first impression of the neighborhood? "It's very residential, somewhat boring, and not downtown, but at my age and lifestyle, it's nice," he said. "I come home, I have a million restaurants to go to, two parks, and I can walk to my horses at Claremont if I want to."

A few blocks north, Julia Stone, 31, who works in the fashion industry, bought a $350,000 jumbo studio late last year after being priced out of "younger, hipper" SoHo. Like Mr. Mitchell, she said she was pleasantly surprised by her new environs on 86th Street near First Avenue.

"It's really quiet," said Ms. Stone, who found the apartment with the help of Mitzie Lau, a broker at Corcoran. "When you're with people all day and talking to people all day, you start to need a little solitude."

Yet, Ms. Stone said, "Everything I need is up here; independent bookstores, movie theater, everything." Public transportation is the biggest drawback; to get to her job in the garment center, Ms. Stone takes the bus to the Upper West Side, where she transfers to a downtown train.

Bad transportation is the least of Eyal Vadai's complaints about life in the northern reaches of the Upper East Side. "I honestly feel like I'm in Guam," said Mr. Vadai, 28, an Internet marketing entrepreneur. About 18 months ago, working with Julie Friedman, a senior associate broker at Bellmarc, he bought a one-bedroom fixer-upper on 91st Street near Third Avenue for $215,000. Taxis are scarce, he said, and cost $12 to take downtown, where he likes to eat at restaurants with his fiancée, Danielle Goffin, 27, a talent negotiator.

Speaking from his office on West 38th Street about the culinary desolation surrounding his apartment, Mr. Vadai noted: "There I have a kosher pizzeria and a Brother Jimmy's. I'm isolated from everything. I go there to sleep, to live, and nothing else. So I spend most of my time outside of the apartment." With a $60,000 renovation completed, he plans to sell early next year, and keeps a calendar on his computer marking off the days until the second anniversary of his closing, after which his profit will be excluded from taxation.

On the lower end of the Upper East Side, recent empty-nesters Patrick and Carolyn Dolan are preparing to take up residence in a freshly minted, $5.4 million three-bedroom condo at One Beacon Court on 58th Street opposite Bloomingdale's. Eighteen-year denizens of a 35th-floor condo near Lincoln Center, they spent the last six years hunting for a bigger Upper West Side place with equally commanding views.

"We were leaning toward Central Park West, but the more we looked, the more we found that the buildings were not offering what we wanted at a price we thought was reasonable," said Ms. Dolan, a principal at an investment management firm. Of the new apartment, shown to them by S. Jean Meisel, a senior vice president and managing director at Brown Harris Stevens, she said, "When we saw it, we loved it."

But what about the neighborhood? "We always wondered, why do we want to be by Bloomingdale's?" Ms. Dolan said. "But finally, after we saw so many things that were not inviting compared to what we lived in, we thought we might as well give it a try."

Ms. Lee, the architect who moved to East 76th Street despite misgivings about the area's homogeneity, is more sanguine these days. She has formed a close-knit circle of friends, though fewer of them work in creative fields than her former compatriots. "I'm very happy where I am; I love the park, and I love my friends," she said.

Still, she allowed, she wasn't sure if she would do it over again. "I might have looked a little harder downtown," she said.

A Roof Garden? It's Much More Than That

(Photo: The planting proceeds on the roof of the Silvercup Studies complex, above, in Long Island City, Queens. The green-roof idea is slowly taking hold in New York. )

August 10, 2005 , New York Times
By LISA CHAMBERLAIN

As temperatures soared over 90 degrees and New York City broke records for electricity use at the end of July, landscapers were installing a "green" roof at Silvercup Studios in Long Island City, Queens, where parts of the HBO series "The Sopranos" are filmed.

Above Tony Soprano's head will be New York City's largest green roof, a thin layer of plants covering 35,000 square feet in a design that aims to reduce air pollution, control heating and cooling costs, and absorb storm water runoff.

Proponents of the project, which has been two years in the making, are hoping to use data collected from it to convince commercial property owners and developers that not only are green roofs good for the environment, they can benefit the bottom line.

The highly visible location near the large Silvercup Studios' sign will be its own best advertisement. A matrix of 1,500 planters will have 20 different species of plants intended to show off their red, yellow and green colors, visible from the Queensboro Bridge when in full bloom.

Not to be confused with a roof garden, however, a green roof is less of an aesthetic amenity than it is a workhorse. The carefully selected plants and soil - engineered to weigh only a fifth as much as typical dirt - help clean the air and absorb rain that would otherwise become storm-water runoff. And when many of them are clustered together, green roofs can reduce the urban heat island effect (densely populated cities tend to be hotter than surrounding areas because of the heat-trapping properties of tall buildings, asphalt and concrete).

Less well established are the benefits of green roofs to property owners and developers. It is known that they can reduce a building's heating and cooling costs, and extend the life of the roof, but the question is, Do the long-term benefits justify the initial cost?

"We are looking to demonstrate to the government, the public and most of all private business that green technologies are an economic benefit," said Stuart Suna, co-owner of Silvercup Studios. "What exactly that benefit is will be determined by this green-roof demonstration project."

The Silvercup project originated with a study undertaken by Diana Balmori of Balmori Associates, a landscape design firm.

Ms. Balmori's interest in the submarket of green-roof design led to a comprehensive assessment of New York City's flat-roof buildings. What she discovered is that Long Island City has 667 acres of empty flat-roof surfaces suitable for vegetation, an area more than three-quarters the size of Central Park. Given the available flat roofs, the air pollution generated from the area's heavy industry and traffic, and a nearby power plant that produces 25 percent of the city's electricity, Long Island City turned out to be the perfect green-roof laboratory.

Ms. Balmori took her idea to build a demonstration green roof to the Long Island City Business Development Corporation, the neighborhood's business improvement district; Mr. Suna is a member of the group. They secured a grant from Clean Air Communities, an organization devoted to reducing air pollution and energy consumption in the city's low-income neighborhoods.

The $500,000 grant is paying for the green-roof design by Balmori Associates, and the installation by Greener by Design, a landscaping company based in New York that specializes in green roofs. Ms. Balmori estimates the outlay will be about $10 a square foot, not including the structural engineering costs paid for by Silvercup Studios, or the yearlong study to be undertaken by the Earth Pledge Foundation, a nonprofit environmental advocacy organization based in New York.

Leslie Hoffman, executive director of Earth Pledge, said that once the green roof was established, her organization would measure energy savings as a result of reduced temperature fluctuations in and around the building. The study will also measure the amount of storm-water retention, which alleviates pressure on the city's overtaxed wastewater system.

A study conducted in Chicago, for instance, demonstrated that a green roof absorbed nearly half the water that was captured elsewhere in a conventional roof rain barrel during a downpour.

Richard Heller, president and chief executive of Greener by Design, said energy savings from green roofs would fluctuate depending on the building type, but the greatest savings would be achieved in low-rise flat-roof buildings. The same Chicago study, conducted in 2003, showed that green-roof temperatures were 19 percent to 31 percent cooler during peak daytime hours in July compared with a conventional roof.

Despite the existing data, Ms. Hoffman and many other green-roof proponents agree that appealing to the enlightened self-interest of property owners and developers is not enough. Getting local government involved is critical to reducing the cost of green-roof installation and achieving economies of scale through mass production. With current technology, green roofs typically cost $8 to $10 a square foot, whereas a regular roof costs about $4 to $6 a square foot.

"Isolated green roofs are expensive insulation," Ms. Hoffman said. "But when you have a whole community of green roofs, it changes the microclimate of the area and reduces demand for energy. Think about one sidewalk in front of a building. That doesn't make a transportation path. But if everyone has one in front of their property, you have a way to walk around the city. Only a citywide effort can achieve that."

To that end, proponents in New York have been lobbying City Hall to offer incentives to developers and property owners. While green-roof incentives are still in the "nice idea" phase at City Hall in New York, Chicago has been a proponent of green roofs since Mayor Richard M. Daley installed the country's first municipal green roof on top of City Hall in 2001. Chicago now has both requirements and incentives in place for private businesses to follow the city's lead.

As a result, Sadhu Johnston, Chicago's commissioner of the environment, said there were approximately two million square feet of green roofs already built or in various stages of construction in Chicago. Currently, New York City has approximately 60,000 square feet of green roofs built or under construction.

Two years ago, Chicago began offering a density bonus in the central business district in exchange for green-roof installation. The city uses a complex formula to calculate the bonus, but at least 50 percent of the roof must be covered with vegetation before the bonus starts to apply. More significantly, of the estimated 150 green-roof projects currently in development, only 12 are taking advantage of the city's incentives. The rest are being built because the city requires that new developments that benefit from city financing must install a green roof.

"It's a combination of incentives and requirements," Mr. Johnston said. McDonald's built a flagship restaurant in downtown Chicago and installed a highly visible, 3,150-square-foot, bi-level green roof. Target and Apple Computer have also installed green roofs on their stores in Chicago.

While studies in Chicago and other cities in Canada and Europe have demonstrated the environmental benefits of green roofs, green roof proponents know they need hard numbers to convince New York's developers of the economic benefits.

"We want to bridge the gap between theory and reality," said Glenn Goldstein, program director for Clean Air Communities. "Having definitive data that informs developers and other real estate people how a green roof could perform for them is critical."

The Boom Spreads: This House Is Valued at $350,000

(Photo : Domingo and Milagros Rodriguez endured many difficulties in their East New York neighborhood but have never wanted to leave, despite their daughter's pleas. They bought their house, above, for $62,000 in 1987. It is now worth more than five times that.)

August 7, 2005

By DENNIS HEVESI.

FOR years, Maria N. Rodriquez has been hoping her parents would sell their home in East New York, Brooklyn, and move someplace safer and more appealing.

Ms. Rodriguez, a 33-year-old mortgage consultant, remembers her anxious teenage years walking down desolate streets in a neighborhood that was one of the most run-down and crime-plagued communities in New York City.

But now, Ms. Rodriguez wonders whether her parents were right to stay in the two-family attached brick house on Montauk Avenue - a mile west of the Brooklyn-Queens border - that they bought with an uncle for $62,000 in 1987.

East New York has changed, especially in the last five years. Last year, her parents' home was assessed at $350,000, a breathtakingly high number for those who think of the neighborhood as a symbol of urban decay.
Although the crime rate is still higher than in some neighborhoods in the city, it is way down. "For years I pleaded with them to move to a better neighborhood for safety reasons, and because I was embarrassed," said Ms. Rodriguez, who now lives in a small ranch-style house in Island Park, on Long Island. "I made friends who lived elsewhere and they'd heard about East New York and would not come visit."

When she would push for a move, her parents - Domingo, 62, and Milagros, 53 - "would always say yes," Ms. Rodriguez said, "but that would be the end of the conversation." Perhaps, somehow, they knew something better was coming.

Only a decade ago, the community was pockmarked by "vacant lots, burned-out homes on every block," Ms. Rodriguez said. "Now they're putting homes into every nook and cranny."

The numbers support her perception. From 1995 through the first half of this year, according to the New York City Department of Finance, the average price for a two-family home in East New York nearly tripled, to $351,561 from $122,524.

Investment by homeowners in the neighborhood also grew significantly. Home-purchase loans worth $279 million were originated in East New York in 2002, up from $66 million six years earlier, according to statistics compiled under the federal Home Mortgage Disclosure Act.

Construction is also booming. From 1994 to 2004, certificates of occupancy for 3,776 new housing units were issued, according to the Department of City Planning.

"That is more than for any community district in the city outside of Manhattan or Staten Island," said Ingrid Gould Ellen, deputy director of the Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy at New York University. "The data show continued and growing investment in East New York."

Much of East New York's revival has been spurred by city programs under which the Department of Housing Preservation and Development subsidized nonprofit groups in the construction of large swaths of neatly attractive attached houses for low- and moderate-income home buyers or renters, or the rehabilitation of dilapidated buildings scattered on block after block throughout the community.

But in the last five years - prompted, perhaps, by those new pastel-shaded row houses and rehabbed homes, and certainly by low interest rates - developers have snapped up hundreds of vacant lots and abandoned buildings to create market-rate housing, and buyers have been willing to pay the rising prices.

"A decade or two ago, the market was not strong enough for new market-rate development to work in East New York; today it does," said Shaun Donovan, the city's housing commissioner. "And with low interest rates, you see lots of market-rate construction that is affordable to people making roughly an average income for New York City."

The median income for a family of four in the metropolitan area is $62,800. In East New York, Mr. Donovan said, families with that income can afford a two- or three-family house. "And with the rent from the other units, it's a very affordable way to live," he said.

Gerard Longo has watched the prices rise. "There's been an increase in value in the area of 10 to 15 percent just over the last calendar year," said Mr. Longo, who, as president of Madison Estates and Properties in nearby Marine Park, has closed about 60 sales in East New York so far this year.

For example, a semiattached two-family home on Bergen Street - a two-bedroom over a three-bedroom with a basement - recently sold for $335,000, Mr. Longo said. "That property would have been, a year ago, $290,000 to $300,000," he said, "and five years ago it would have been about $170,000."

A one-family attached brick home on Mother Gaston Boulevard, with three bedrooms, a dining room and two baths, "was recently up for sale for $270,000, and sold within two weeks for $260,000," Mr. Longo said. "Five years ago, it would have been $140,000, $150,000."

Plummeting crime rates have certainly contributed to the increasing home values. In 1993, East New York's 75th Precinct set the city's all-time record of 126 murders; last year, there were 29. In 1993, there were 10,355 serious crimes (murders, rapes, robberies, felony assaults, burglaries, grand larcenies and auto thefts) in the precinct; last year, there were 3,920 - a 62 percent decline. "People can see and feel the tangible application of police resources," said Deputy Commissioner Paul J. Browne, the department's chief spokesman.

Not that the 5.6-square-mile community has evolved into a pristine haven. There are still ramshackle buildings with boarded-up windows, vacant lots, razor-wire coils on fences, junkyards harboring piggy-backed car hulks.
But there is also now, on many blocks, fresh paint on house after house, front yards with flowers blooming, wrought-iron gates bearing ornamental sculptures. And just as there always were, even during the roughest days, some tree-lined streets shade stately old, even ornate, single-family homes. Around Arlington Avenue and Warwick Street, in the northern section of the community, there are century-old restored homes. The highest price for an East New York home in the last year, Mr. Longo said after checking the South Shore Multiple Listing Service, was $420,000, paid in April for a 1901 attached three-bedroom on Miller Avenue with bay windows and an arched entrance.

The community's prime commercial strip - Pennsylvania Avenue, from Linden Boulevard to Flatlands Avenue, with the 42-building, 6,000-unit Spring Creek Towers middle-income residential complex looming to its south - is now dotted with chain stores. Just east of the towers, on what had been a municipal landfill, the 640,000-square-foot Gateway Mall opened in 2002, employing about 1,500 people. And adjoining the mall, construction is to start next spring on Gateway Estates - 2,300 housing units in single-, two- and three-family homes, with 844 units set aside as city-subsidized housing.

And yet, for Maria Rodriguez, as she continues to weigh whether her parents should move out of their modest home, it is hard to disregard the bad old days. "This was a rough block," she said of Montauk Avenue, between Pitkin and Belmont Avenues. "My mother and father very rarely allowed us out, day or night. There were drug sales 24 hours a day on the block, around the block. There was gunfire. Not every night, every third night; not that that's much better."

Ms. Rodriguez concedes that much has changed. "It seems like a different world," she said. "The home facades are being redone, people taking pride. It's quieter, cleaner. On Pitkin, I notice the number of new businesses; the awnings are a lot nicer."

Purely from a housing point of view, Domingo and Milagros Rodriguez have just about seen it all in East New York since they arrived, separately, from the Dominican Republic in 1967.

They met in East New York, while both were living doubled-up with relatives. After they married in 1970, they moved into a tiny one-bedroom - with a bathtub in the kitchen - on Atkins Avenue, one block from the home they now own. The rent was $80 a month. Within four years, three children had arrived; and in that tiny bedroom, Mr. Rodriguez, a carpenter, built a triple-decker bed. The Atkins Avenue building has since been razed, along with all the others on and around the block, to make way for 42 city-subsidized single-family affordable houses developed by the nonprofit Nehemiah Homes Development Fund.

In 1974, the Rodriguez family moved six blocks to the northwest into a three-story, yellow-brick walk-up on Glenmore Street where they blissfully spread out into a four-bedroom railroad flat. Over their 13-year tenancy there, their rent ranged from $200 to $500 a month.

Several weeks ago, Maria Rodriguez walked by the Glenmore Street building and, in a hint of the community's persisting difficulties, encountered a woman living there with her young daughter and two nieces. The woman said she had not paid rent for months since the landlord had abandoned the building, which has had no hot water or heat since last winter.

By stark contrast that same day, half a block from the Rodriguez's Montauk Avenue home, at the corner of Belmont Avenue, power saws were whining and hammers thudding as workers added the final trim on five new attached three-family, tan-brick homes with high-pitched roofs - all for rent.

The 15 homes -12 three-bedrooms and 3 two-bedrooms, all with balconies, air-conditioning, wall-to-wall carpeting and wiring for cable - are renting for $1,300 to $1,600 a month. They were developed by Vishnu Bandhu, owner of the Guy America Development Enterprises Corporation. And they are among the dozens of small market-rate projects that now dot so many blocks in the community. Mr. Bandhu alone has built 27 homes for rent or sale in East New York over the last five years. "I consider myself one of the starters here," he said.
Five years ago, a vacant 25-by-100-foot lot cost $35,000, Mr. Bandhu said. "Today, the same lot sells for $160,000; I just closed one," he said. "Five years ago, I sold a two-family for about $325,000; now the same house might sell for about $450,000."

East New York has become a personal matter for Mr. Bandhu. Four years ago, he and his wife and daughter moved from Astoria, Queens, into a home at the corner of Pitkin and Shepherd Avenues. "I built it myself; it has everything I want: a Jacuzzi, central air," he said. "My wife never wanted to come here because she was so scared - the East New York bad reputation. Now we feel like home because the people around here are very friendly. They say good morning on the sidewalk, laugh and talk with you."

Mr. Bandhu's home is four blocks from the Rodriguez home. There, seated with her parents on their balcony, Maria Rodriguez said she remained conflicted. "Should I have them move, stay put?" she said. "They say, 'Let's stay, this is my home, this is what I know.' They may be right right now, because whatever they sell this home for, whatever amount they get for it, will probably not be enough to move into another neighborhood because of the overpriced market. So, I give up."

Mr. Rodriguez said: "It's much better here now, new houses all over the place. People that left want to come back."

He smiled at his daughter. "Sometimes she knows more than me," he said, then winked.

Books, Not Tales, Get Taller Before Baby Boomers' Eyes

New York Times August 12, 2005

By EDWARD WYATT

They carried dog-eared copies of "On the Road" in their back pockets during college and devoured Tom Clancy paperbacks on airplanes as young executives. But as baby boomers near retirement, they are finding it harder and harder to read the small type of mass-market paperbacks, the pocket-size books that are the most popular segment of the publishing business.

Faced with declining sales, two of the biggest publishers of mass-market titles, the Penguin Group and Simon & Schuster, have begun issuing new paperbacks by some of their most popular authors in a bigger size that allows larger type and more space between lines.

"We've been losing the foundation of our customer base because their eyesight is getting worse, and the books are getting harder and harder to read," said Jack Romanos, the chief executive of Simon & Schuster, whose Pocket Books division introduced the mass-market paperback format in the United States in 1939.

More mass-market paperbacks are still sold each day than any other type of book; last year consumers bought 535 million of them. But that number has steadily declined for a decade and is down 11 percent in the last five years, while the overall number of books sold has fallen just 7 percent, according to the Book Industry Study Group, a publishing trade group.

For publishers, the main advantage of the new book is that it is the same width as a traditional mass-market paperback, which allows it to fit in the wire racks at airports, grocery stores and drugstores. Those outlets are among the biggest sellers of the romances, westerns, mysteries and thrillers that make up the bulk of paperbacks sold. Publishers have also raised the cover price of the new books to $9.99, $2 to $3 more than the traditional paperback but still less than the $14 cover price of the digest-size books, known as trade paperbacks, that are now the primary format for nonfiction books and literary novels.

Readers appear to be responding well. Larger-edition paperbacks of six authors have made it onto the New York Times paperback best-seller list since last month, when they started appearing regularly in stores. The Pocket Books edition of "White Hot," the latest suspense novel by Sandra Brown, is in the new format and will top The Times's list on Aug. 21, the first time one of the new, bigger editions will reach No. 1. (That list reflects sales in the week ended Aug. 6.)

"We've gotten so many letters and e-mails from readers saying, 'Thank you for making the type larger,' " said Leslie Gelbman, the president of mass-market paperbacks at Penguin, which test-marketed the first larger paperback in December. Good response to that offering led Penguin, a division of Pearson, to expand its program this year to seven of its best-selling authors, including the romance novelist Nora Roberts and the thriller writers Clive Cussler and Robin Cook.

Harlequin Enterprises, the biggest seller of romance novels, has also joined the movement. Last month it began issuing larger-format paperbacks of its new line of romances for older women, called Next.

Not all of the responses have been positive, however. Publishing industry executives said that some big discount retailers, including Wal-Mart Stores, objected to the higher price of the new paperbacks and ordered smaller-than-normal volumes of the books because of doubts whether their customers would buy as many.

And at least some readers have complained about the new format. On the electronic message board on the Internet site of Vince Flynn, whose latest thriller, "Memorial Day," was published in the new format last month by Pocket's Star imprint, some fans have said that the new books feel clunky and are difficult to hold. Others say they like the changes, however, and over all the new book is selling better than Mr. Flynn's last novel, according to Simon & Schuster, a unit of Viacom.

The large bookstore chains, including Borders Group and Barnes & Noble, are taking a wait-and-see attitude. "We need more time to be able to judge," said Allison Elsby, the manager for genre fiction at Borders and its Waldenbooks division. "There are just a handful of titles out in this format, and while the initial reaction looks relatively positive, it has only been a few weeks."

Publishers have tinkered with the size of mass-market paperbacks over the decades, mostly to meet the demands of printing presses. But at a time when sales of ready-made reading glasses are up - they grew 11 percent last year alone, to $439 million, according to VisionWatch, an eyeglass industry research group - this change is meant to meet the needs of those who buy and read paperbacks.

To make the new books easier to read, publishers increased their height by three-quarters of an inch, to 7½ inches, while keeping the same width, 4¼ inches. The longer page allows publishers to increase the type size by up to a half-point, to 10½ points, and to increase the leading - the space between lines - to 14½ points from about 12. As a result, a page of the new books has about 32 lines, compared with as many as 38 lines in their predecessors.

Sales of mass-market paperbacks have also been declining for reasons other than America's worsening eyesight. Book superstores and warehouse clubs routinely discount the price of hardcovers by as much as 50 percent, giving readers less reason to wait - customarily, a year - after a new book is published to buy the cheaper paperback version.

In addition, the decline of the mall bookstores led to fewer impulse purchases of the lower-priced books, and the popularity of trade paperbacks grew significantly when Oprah Winfrey began recommending those books exclusively for her book club.

Because price-conscious discount merchants like Wal-Mart and Target also grew in importance as booksellers, publishers of mass-market paperbacks have been unable to raise prices, which have been essentially flat for a decade. To maintain their profit margins, publishers have resorted to lower-quality paper and other methods of lowering production cost.

But the smaller pocket-size paperback is still used for the authors whose books sell the most copies, like John Grisham, whose novels reside for eternity on the backlist, the most profitable part of a publisher's inventory. And it is those continuing sales - which sometimes total five or more times the number of hardcovers sold - that allow publishers to pay the large advances that those most popular authors demand.

Some publishers remain skeptical about the changes. Irwyn Applebaum, president and publisher of the Bantam Dell Publishing Group at Random House, said that Bantam Books had tried a similar experiment in the late 1980's but abandoned it after issuing about three books.

"We think the current mass-market format is best," he said.

But Mr. Romanos of Simon & Schuster said that without the change, the mass-market segment was in danger of withering. "If you go back 20 years, the mass-market paperback was really driving the business," he said. But more recently, "it hasn't been carrying its weight."

"As long as we have to continue to pay what we do for brand-name authors, we need a healthier paperback format to make it work."

M.B.A. Students Bypassing Wall Street for a Summer in India

Jason Rosenthal, a summer intern at Infosys in Bangalore. (Photo: Namas Bhojani for The New York Times)

August 10, 2005
By SARITHA RAI

BANGALORE, India, Aug. 9 - This summer, Omar Maldonado and Erik Simonsen, both students at the Leonard N. Stern School of Business at New York University, did something different.

Bypassing internship opportunities on Wall Street, just a subway ride away from their Greenwich Village campus, they went to India to spend the summer at an outsourcing company in Gurgaon, a suburb of New Delhi.
"The India opportunity grabbed me," said Mr. Maldonado, a Boston native whose family is from the Dominican Republic. "I wanted to get a global feel for investment banking and not just a Wall Street perspective."

He and Mr. Simonsen, both 27, are spending three months at Copal Partners, an outsourcing firm with 100 analysts. It produces merger and acquisition pitch books and provides equity and credit analysis and other research to global banks and consultant groups, including those on Wall Street.

Mr. Maldonado and Mr. Simonsen, of Riverside, Calif., are part of a virtual invasion of India by American students. Graduate students from top schools in the United States, most from master of business administration programs, are vying for internships at India's biggest private companies. For many, outsourcing companies are the destinations of choice.

India is not just a line on an American student's résumé, said Kiran Karnik, president of the outsourcing industry trade body, Nasscom, "but also culturally fulfilling." Many students travel while in India, giving them a view of the country and its long history, he said.

Nasscom is now trying to track the ever-increasing numbers of foreign interns. Many are in India to study globalization firsthand, Mr. Karnik said; that is often not possible in China because, unlike India, English is not widely spoken there.

Mr. Karnik said he had met more than a dozen interns from the Harvard Business School who were spending this summer in India. "I expect a bigger horde of students to arrive next year because the ones here said they had a great time and will go home to talk about it," he said.

Elsewhere, too, the trend is on the rise. Four students from Fuqua School of Business at Duke University are interning in India, compared with only one last year and none in 2003. Of this year's interns, three are at Infosys Technologies, an outsourcing company in Bangalore, and the fourth is in Chennai at GlobalGiving, an organization based in Bethesda, Md., that helps support social, economic and environmental projects around the world.

At Georgetown University, Stanley D. Nollen, a professor of international business at the Robert Emmett McDonough School of Business, said India was of growing interest to students.

"No longer is India thought of as a land of snake charmers and bride burnings," he said. "Now India means the world's best software services, and increasingly, pharmaceuticals and auto parts."

Professor Nollen directs the school's programs for M.B.A. students in India, which include "residencies" - academic courses that are centered on consulting projects for companies operating in India. A group of 49 students arrived this month and went to companies like Philips India Software and MindTree Consulting, both in Bangalore; the motorcycle-making unit of Eicher in Chennai; and the ICICI Bank in Mumbai.

India can be a jolt to a first-time American visitor. In Gurgaon, a small town despite its tall office complexes and shiny new malls, Mr. Maldonado and Mr. Simonsen share an apartment where the power fails several times a day. Temperatures are regularly above 100 degrees Fahrenheit in the summer.

The two men said they came prepared to find inadequate infrastructure, but were not prepared for the daily frustrations of Gurgaon. There is no mass transportation system, and shopping, even for something as basic as an umbrella, can take hours. They rumble to work in an auto rickshaw - a motorized three-wheeler that seats two and is a ubiquitous form of transport in Indian cities.

But the sophistication of the work being done in Copal's Gurgaon office contrasts with the chaotic city outside. Mr. Simonsen said he was amazed. "I came expecting to see number-crunching and spreadsheet type of work; I didn't expect American banks to farm out intricate analytics," he said. The two students are working on a project that analyzes investment opportunities for clients across 23 countries.

Infosys Technologies, the country's second-largest outsourcing firm after Tata Consultancy Services, discovered how popular India had become as an internship destination for Americans when the company began recruiting: for the 40 intern spots at its Bangalore headquarters, the company received 9,000 applications. Only those with a cumulative grade-point average of 3.6 or more made it to a short list, and then they were put through two rounds of interviews.

The final 40, who cut a wide academic swathe from engineering schools like M.I.T. and Carnegie Mellon to business schools like Stanford, Wharton and Kellogg, have since arrived on campus for average stays of three months. The interns work in areas from marketing to technology. They live in a 500-room hotel complex on Infosys's expansive campus in the suburbs of Bangalore, exchanging coupons for meals at the food court and riding the company bus downtown to decompress at the many pubs and bars.

Among the Infosys interns is Caton Burwell, 28, from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. "India has come to symbolize globalization and I wanted to participate in the workings of the global economy," he said. "Besides, it would look great on my résumé."

Mr. Burwell said that, since arriving in India, he had developed a better grasp of the workings of the global economy and the logic behind the choices companies and countries make. "Being here is a powerful experience; it is impossible not to think differently," he said.

Also, his attitude toward outsourcing has changed since meeting Indian employees, who he said work very hard and care a great deal about the quality of their work. "To come here, meet these people, and to return home and turn your back on outsourcing is hard," he said.

Jeffrey Anders, 29, from the Sloan School of Management at M.I.T., is similarly stirred. Mr. Anders is halfway through his internship at the business process outsourcing division of Hewlett-Packard India in Bangalore.
"I can't help but feel that I am witnessing the creation of a new global economic order, a new reality that most people back home don't realize is coming," said Mr. Anders.

After a meeting with the recruiting head of Hewlett-Packard India's back-office unit at a conference at M.I.T., Mr. Anders came to India to help build a group of Indian economists and statisticians to perform complex analytics and predictive modeling for Western multinationals. "These highly educated and qualified people are not stopping at call centers and back-office work," he said. "They are getting ready to compete for every job."

Meanwhile, Indian companies are looking at summer internships as a way of building a diverse work culture.
"Bringing investment bankers here provides our Indian team a perspective and context of Wall Street," said Joel Perlman, co-founder of Copal Partners, a company based in London that has four employees each in New York and London and another 100 or so in India.

Other companies, and even the schools themselves, are looking at internships as a step toward attracting bright young Americans to work in India. Infosys, for instance, hired Joshua Bornstein, a former intern from Claremont McKenna College in California, nearly two years ago as its first American employee based in India.

"In this increasingly global economy, we would expect to see India become an even greater source of employment for our students," Sheryle Dirks, director of the Career Management Center at Fuqua, said.

Mr. Anders, from the Sloan school, works in a new Hewlett-Packard building, where he sometimes works out at the gym in the basement and eats at the cafeteria on the terrace. The employees work in open cubicles, similar to those in offices anywhere in the West. His team consists of four Indians, all with M.B.A.'s like him, and they operate globally, collaborating with teams in California and elsewhere.

Interns like Mr. Anders are getting a close view of social changes that are happening in India. Outsourcing has created thousands of better-paying jobs and spawned communities of young people who can afford cars, apartments and iPods.

"I thought the stipend was the down side," said Mr. Anders, "but coming here is a priceless experience."

Blog and Grind

Photo : "When I go into work, I switch off," Mimi says, adding, "Whatever you want, I'll name the price." (Stephanie Keith for The New York Times)

August 7, 2005
By PAUL BERGER

"WHEN I go into work I switch off. I feel nothing, I have no opinions. I have no sense of shame, no emotion, everything closed, tucked neatly out of sight. In that way you become a negated space, a void for people to fill in however they desire. I'm Mimi the walking, talking doll, the paint-by-numbers English chick, whatever you want, I'll name the price. I'm the cute, young, private table dancer who makes people laugh and does things men in their forties only wish their first wives had taught them." - Mimi in New York

It's 6 p.m. on a Wednesday in the heart of Midtown. In the dim, subterranean light of a gentlemen's club, Mimi is standing behind the bar, her back to a couple of customers who have just walked in. Resting her elbows on the surface in front of her, she bends forward slowly to reveal a blue neon light in the background that is advertising sushi. To her right, on a T-shaped runway bordered by fairy lights, a semi-naked blonde checks her watch, while the D.J. announces the names of the dancers who will appear next on the bar and the stage.

It's been a slow day at the club, almost as slow as July Fourth. But for Mimi, business is about to pick up.
Mimi Feo, as she calls herself, is a 26-year-old graduate of Cambridge University in England. She arrived in New York in February, hoping to begin a journalism career. The problem was that her six-month visa was for a previous job as a chef on cruise ships, not life as a journalist. Her only literary release now is the caustic Web log Mimi in New York (miminewyork.blogspot.com), a venture that was supposed to chart her rise to journalistic stardom but instead recorded her journey into the very different world of lap dancing.

Mimi is still a writer at heart, but her body is now devoted to the dance. She is dressed in a body-hugging, full-length stripper gown and armed with an acid retort for every smart-aleck remark. She oozes self-confidence, but privately she is becoming desperate. Her visa expires at the end of August. Her readers are waiting to see if she will pack up and leave, and if she does, how long before she is back.

It had all started out so well. In February, Mimi began work as an intern for a travel writer and took a job as a waitress to explore the city's immigrant underbelly. In March and April, two stories of hers were published on the Village Voice Web site: "How to Be an Illegal Alien" and "London Snog." But Mimi could not be paid unless she had a journalist's visa.

All she needed for that, she thought, was a couple of clips from British newspapers and a letter from an editor. But they never came. In May and June two British newspapers, The Guardian and The Times, showed interest and then changed their minds.

Even the job working in a strip club started out with better intentions. Mimi walked in one lunchtime in early May seeking a position as a cocktail waitress in a final attempt to find story ideas. It wasn't until her money ran out that she ditched the drinks tray for six-inch heels and a gown.

"These men are paying for that long-ago teenage time when sex wasn't just a given, when sex was something you didn't know whether you could get or not. They're paying for the tease." - Mimi in New York

Every character in Mimi's Web log, including her own, has a pseudonym. Her workplace, one of the better-known gentlemen's clubs in Manhattan, is populated by characters like Mr. High Ranking U.N. official, Mafia Joe and Bambi. Lately, however, they have been eclipsed by the arrival of Eton, an upper-class Englishman who persuaded the stripper to go on a date. Could Mimi in New York be headed for a "Pretty Woman" ending?

Mimi steps away from the bar and disappears into a corner of the club, away from the flashing A.T.M. She has been working since noon, and her shift finishes at 8. She has earned only $90, but in the next 90 minutes she will make an additional $410. The place is starting to fill up. About half of the 20 young women are otherwise engaged in the Champagne Room, a dim, closet-size space that holds half a dozen couples. That leaves only a handful of girls on the club's main floor, and Mimi is in great demand.

In one sense, Mimi achieved a small part of her goal with her employment at the club; strippers, like writers, are treated as freelancers. Dancers pay what is called a house fee to work the floor: $75 during the day and $150 at night. On top of that, they pay a $20 tip to the D.J. and $20 to the house mom (who provides baby oil, bandages and a needle and thread at all times). After that not inconsiderable outlay, everything a dancer earns is profit. On a slow day it may be $200, on an average day nearer $500 or $600, and on a good day $700 or more. Mimi says she earns $2,000 to $3,000 in a four-day week. But these sums are not predicated on giving random men $20 lap dances.

"The way of making money is to build up a relationship with a client, to get the guys to fall in love with you and keep them coming back," Mimi says. "You draw them in by pretending that they know something about you. Guys always want to know your real name. As soon as they think they know that, you start reeling them in. They want a fantasy, but at the same time they want some intimacy. And they want to believe it's real."

"Nothing could induce me to ever give up my dream of being a writer. And the longer I work in a seedy, sweaty world where sex is the currency and my body a hundred dollar bill, the more I know that writing isn't just an escape. It's what I will do for the rest of my life. And this is just a means to make that happen." - Mimi in New York

MANY of the clients who frequent the club are people Mimi would rather not meet, let alone flirt with. There's the 80-year-old who shows up every Saturday, buys a single black currant cordial and watches the women all day. "A lot of the guys are really weird," Mimi says. "They are very rich, very successful, but they turn out to be perverts."

Some regulars can be seen greeting dancers like friends, a harmless kiss on the cheek, a lazy hand brushing a back or shoulder. For $370, they can take their companion to the Champagne Room, where they are rewarded with one hour's undivided attention and the chance to brush against more than just a back or a shoulder.

At the top of the client pecking order are men who pay $1,500 for one hour away from prying eyes in the Blue Room, the only space not monitored by closed-circuit television. Mimi alludes to the fact that although no touching should ever take place, some clients' particular desires can be satiated and a blind eye turned.

And in terms of women, whatever a client could want, the club has: African-American, Asian, Brazilian and East European, short, tall, slim, curvy, natural and enhanced - 200 freelancers in their 20's and 30's, most of them documented workers: single mothers, students, girls who somehow fell into dancing and forgot to get out.
"No one thinks they are going to become a stripper," Mimi says. "It's just someone you know, or chance, that leads you there."

She adds: "There are so many good days when you party and have nice clients and it's fun. And then there are other days when you are dancing for some awful guy behaving like a kid in a candy store. It's very rare that you can find people that ever appreciate you for who you are."

Paul Berger is a contributing editor of "Blog! How the Newest Media Revolution Is Changing Politics, Business, and Culture," to be published in the fall.

日本女性為什麼要在上海找工作？

台灣日本綜合研究所　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　傅婉禎

　　隨著世界經濟及重心逐漸轉移至中國大陸，大家都看到了大陸的商機跟龐大市場所在，很多公司都開始在大陸這塊土地上紮根佈局，像之前台商至大陸工作一樣，日本也興起了一股赴大陸工作的熱潮，連女性也積極前進大陸找頭路，而且這股熱潮近來集中在最近發展極為迅速的上海地區。之所以選擇到上海，在上海工作的日籍女性說道：「因為這裡是世界的中心啊！」

　　台灣企業以前被派往大陸的人員或是管理階層，薪資通常是在台灣工作的兩倍以上，但隨著時間及整個經濟情勢的轉變，現在即使是比在台灣工作的薪水少也有人願意赴大陸就業，除了因為大陸目前經濟整個起飛外，物價便宜及就業市場龐大，現在已不是求職者的賣方市場，而轉變為求才者的買方市場，人才市場也逐漸走向無國界的境界。

　　比起台灣，日本由於物價水準高，光是在日本工作的薪資就相當於台灣的三倍左右，早期被從日本總社派遣至大陸駐守的人員，跟台灣的情況相似，由於在大陸生活不便，若是沒有比在日本高的薪資是沒有人願意被派駐到大陸的，因此薪資就更高了。在海外工作的日本人薪資結構是分成總社派駐人員及當地錄用的人員這兩種(像是在日本工作的員工跟派遣員工的區別一樣)，被派駐人員跟當地錄用人員的職務跟薪資也有差別，但由於基本上當地錄用所給的薪資還是以能維持一般日本人的生活為準，所以薪資也比當地中國人平均的薪資高3~4倍。但這種好日子已經是過往雲煙了，如今駐外薪資已逐年下降，再加上有些當地錄取的人員是較為年輕的人及留學大陸的社會新鮮人，下降的幅度更是大。

　　隨著日商的移駐大陸，中國人的日語學習熱也高漲，第一名是上海市，二~四名則是東北三省(分別是遼寧省、黑龍江省、吉林省)，在這三個地區會日語的人才不但豐富，跟上海比起來薪資跟物價都較便宜，也難怪光是大連就有約2000家日系企業進駐。看到大陸人的努力搶工作，想要在大陸工作的日本人，基本的要求有兩個：一個是要在日本有工作經驗，另一個是要會中文。

當然，以日本人的民族性，也不可能放棄既有的優勢，依日前日本文部科學省的最新統計調查資料顯示，日本高中生選擇修學旅行的地方第一名是中國，也隨著去中國旅行的人氣大增，開設中文課程的高中及選擇修習中文的學生也不斷增加，是除英文之外最受高中生青睞的外國語文，不知是否連高中生都開始查覺了這股中國熱，知道未來不會中文將會在就業市場吃大虧呢？　　雖說欲取得在大陸的就業簽證有最低兩年工作經驗的門檻，但在一些大批日系企業進駐的著名地區，就算不符合中國大陸核發就業簽證的兩年工作經驗底限，也有獲得就業簽證的情形，所以也就演變出有剛畢業的新鮮人，為了求職而直接前來大陸的情形。

　　在這種時機下，對會中文但無法活用或在現任工作崗位上不得志的日本女性來說是個絕佳的機會，像是上海雖然城市已被塑造成一流的先進大都市，但物價卻依舊很便宜，就算拿到的薪水比在日本少，但在上海想要享受比在日本更舒適的生活還是綽綽有餘，而對喜歡刺激的年輕人來說，赴外國就業是在日本國內就業所沒有的刺激，在跟當地中國人同樣的條件下，領著破壞行情的薪水在中國工作的日本女性也越來越多。

　　為什麼日本女性願意領破壞行情的薪水呢？在日本，女性的工作能力要被認可其實不是件容易的事，大多數的公司主管都有刻板印象，認為女性在結了婚之後就會離職，或是來上班是為了釣金龜婿的觀念，因此同時期進公司的男性及女性，主管所欲給予的資源或是指派的工作內容也不同，像一般日本女性進公司要學的第一件事就是倒茶，但男性卻不用！雖說現在是講究男女平等的時代，但這樣的舊習還是普遍存在一些日系公司。時代日新月異，日本女性已不單單只滿足於家庭，目前日本的職業婦女也不少，日本男性也漸漸能接受自己的老婆在結婚後也出去工作幫家裡增添一份收入，而不再以為是恥辱，畢竟對一個家庭而言，雙薪還是比單薪來得輕鬆。

再加上現在年輕一代大多覺得婚姻是枷鎖，擁抱「獨身主義」的女性佔大多數，女性結了婚之後還多了一項家事需做，若想保有自己原本的工作，就得找人幫忙家事，而丈夫會願意幫忙的又在少數，因此覺得不結婚反而樂得輕鬆的女性不在少數！在這種環境下，日本女性越來越想在職場一展長才、工作能力，希望被肯定、經濟也希望能獨立，不願再如以往被視為是來公司當花瓶的角色！

　　據一位之前在上海中國IT企業工作的日本女性表示，像她就是自己請求要跟中國人領相同的薪水的。在同樣的能力、做同樣的事情下，只因為是日本人所拿的薪資就比較高是無法讓其他人信服的。另外兩位日本女性，也是透過在大陸當地的徵才活動而進入日系企業，在大陸的合資公司擔任業務課長：其中一位是慶應大學畢業的高材生，之前是在知名金融金構從事一般的職務，鑑於公司在裁員且撤收海外據點，又覺得自己在分社工作無法活用所學的中文，因而決定轉戰上海。另一位則是東京外語大學畢業後進入知名的通信公司，由於想做跟中國相關的工作，但覺得在現任公司要被派遣到中國的機會很小，所以便利用大陸當地錄取的機會，直接進入大陸就職，希望趁年輕往更能活用中文的路前進！

　　知名人才仲間公司上海創價諮詢有限公司的金銳副總經理也預測：「只要求要有中、日文的能力，但不問國籍為何的求才案件越來越多。以目前日本人所領的薪資來說算是過高，未來中國人跟日本人在薪資上的地位可能會出現大逆轉的現象。不論是上海或香港，與國籍無關，將來會變成只有以能力來決定薪資的時代。」再上一些知名的世界人才仲介網站，也會發現求職已不再只侷限於你所屬的國家了，現在的求才情報都會標上是哪一國家需要什麼樣的人才，人才雇用的確開始邁向無國界的階段。在新趨勢下，所要求的是能力而非性別或國籍。

　　瞄準了這一點，對於環境適應的勒性又比一般男性來得強的女性們，冒著雖然可能會被稱為「外勞」，或是就算薪水漲了幾倍都比不上日本外派的人員，甚至連其他相關福利都得自己爭取，基於能實踐自己的理想、展現自己的能力或是喜歡大陸，出於自願而選擇到大陸工作，在不斷朝向當地取“才”的日本企業中，日本人跟中國人是站在同樣的起跑點來競賽，唯有提昇自己的能力才不至於輸掉這場比賽。

　　不管是日本女性還是台灣女性，妳做好準備來一展長才，迎接這場無國籍的求職大戰了嗎？

現在日本女性找對象偏愛「三低男」

台灣日本綜合研究所　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　傅婉禎

　聽到「三低男」很多人可能會嚇一跳，想說以前大家都說結婚要找「三高男」，現在的女性怎麼沒志氣到連「三低男」都可以接受了。會說這種話就表示你還不知道什麼叫做「三低男」，因為「三低男」並非是「三高男」的相反詞，而是另一個新時代的名詞。

　以往所稱的「三高男」是指學歷高、收入高、身高高這三個條件，但「三低男」可不是指學歷低、收入低、身高矮喔！

「三低男」的正確定義是指：● 低姿態(即是任何事都Lady First)● 低依存(即是不去束縛對方，尊重彼此的生活)● 低風險(為公務員或持有特殊證照，工作穩定性高)

意即為現代女性所要求的結婚理想對象的條件是姿態低，而且不管經濟面或是家事都能自立自強，不依賴妻子，有份正當且安定的職業，又不會隨便就辭掉工作的男性。

日本過去也經歷過「唯我獨尊」、「治療系」、「年紀較自己小有如寵物般的男生」等各種理想的男性類型，最近則由於『電車男』這本書的影響「秋葉原系」的純情又體貼的男生市價快速上昇，且在「三高男」的理想崩解後，現在對於在工作的女性而言，所需要的男性是可以體諒自己的工作的對象。

經日本的國立社會保障人口問題研究所的2002年所做的「全國結婚及生小孩相關調查」也發現，女性要求結婚對象的條件最高的是「願意放下身段幫忙做家事及育兒」的佔了58.7%、然後是「對自己工作能瞭解並協助」也高達51.2%，至於「經濟力」的部分，只有33.9%的人有要求，以往「三高男」條件之一的「學歷」甚至低到只有5.8%的人會在意。可見從2002年開始「三高男」的條件就已被時代淘汰了。　　

探究到女性為何會改選「三低男」的心理，其實在晚婚化、少子化的時代背景下，不想要結婚的25歲以上男女比例雖然增加了，但期望自己能經由一般戀愛結婚的人數也是持續增加中，尤其是單身女性更是希望能自己找到「能互相尊重且價值觀相符合的人談戀愛，然後結婚」。比起結婚的這種形式，更多女性想要好好照自己的意思過生活，因此在多種因素糾葛下，女性發現最適合自己的就是這種「三低男」。但這也是現代女性希望能擁有自己的時間、希望對方重視自己及抱有向上心的人增加的關係吧！因此對方若能互相尊重、追求不被束縛的關係，對於有自己喜歡的工作的女性是最自然也不過的了。　　

而男性又是怎麼看待自己被稱為「三低男」呢？日本一位受訪男性就表示，在一年前從網路上得知「三低男」這個名稱時，他老婆就說：「沒錯，那正是你的寫照。」他自己則表示完全沒有覺得討厭的感覺，低姿勢及低依存這兩點是大家都認可的，至於有向上心的女性選擇『三低』的原因他也能理解，重點是他覺得因為時代的進步，兩性終於也能有對等的關係了。」至於是否為低風險，該名男性為IT工程師、在大企業上班，且又是被公司派遣去美國唸了2年MBA才回來，確實是低風險沒錯。

但他也提出了一個論點，講到「低風險」的話就會想到終身雇用或是年功序列等依附著公司的感覺，但是只求安定而默默工作的男生，真的有辦法讓有向上心的女強人動心嗎？不過，對於他來說，他覺得老婆身為專業人士的那種「精神上的自立」是最吸引他的一點。雖然說專業的家庭主婦也不賴，但是老婆有自己的想法，在平時講話時就可以帶給自己一些刺激，比起什麼事都要跟老公商量，否則無法做決定的女性來說，有自己想法的女性還比較吸引他。　　

至於詢問到兩位擁有「三低男」丈夫的女性，如果丈夫辭了工作，然後說要去挑戰看看其他事務，因此讓他們產生了「風險」的話呢？一位表示因為覺得丈夫可以，所以贊成且會盡全力地支持他；另一位則表示沒關係暫時讓我養也可以。可見如果老公真的想去做什麼會產生風險的事，有能力的老婆不會像專業家庭主婦擔心家中生計而百般阻止，反而有空間讓老公去做自己想做的事。　　

身為女性雜誌編輯的齋藤薰也表示：會追求「三低男」是現代女性有自信的表現。不但可以成就自己、還可以賺錢，跟以往只想依附在男性身邊，覺得男性一定得比女性各方面都強的所謂「三高男」時代的女性所持有的自信是完全不一樣的，在女性追求「三低男」時也可以感受到女性能無限伸展自己才能的喜悅。至於「三低男」，不但懂得尊敬女性，又是具有社會性及常識的成熟大人絕對會比其他男性要來得受歡迎，而覺得碰到「三低男」才能好好對應的女性們，也不妨將三個條件其中一個拿來要求自己，說不定意外地能早日脫離「敗犬」的行列喔！

They'll Take Manhattan, for a Million or More

August 2, 2005, New York Times

By MICHIKO KAKUTANI

Twenty years ago, in an article in Esquire magazine, Tom Wolfe wrote that the crème de la crème of "the international tribe of those who want to be where things are happening" is "desperate to live in what are known as the Good Buildings," cooperative apartment houses located on two narrow slivers of land on the East Side of Manhattan.
What makes an apartment house a Good Building "may have nothing to do with space, construction, or grandeur," Mr. Wolfe wrote, but more to do with certain attributes on the part of its residents connoting "bourgeois respectability" - namely, "decorous demeanor, dignified behavior, business and social connections, and sheer wealth." The average asking price for one of these coveted apartments, Mr. Wolfe breathlessly noted, was "almost exactly $4 million."
That was then. Today, the average sales price for an apartment in Manhattan - anywhere in Manhattan - has leaped over the million-dollar mark, and in the elite market, prices have soared into the $40 million-plus range.
In a gossipy new book, "The Sky's the Limit," the writer Steven Gaines (photo) reports that more than $300 million worth of condominiums were sold in the new Time Warner complex sight unseen while the building was still under construction. He adds that the south tower of that complex - decidedly not a Good Building in that a prospective buyer need not pass a board interview - "holds the record for the second-most-expensive apartment sold in New York, a 10,000-square-foot duplex on the seventy-fifth and seventy-sixth floor that was purchased for $42.5 million."
Like Mr. Wolfe, Mr. Gaines sifts Manhattan's real estate market for status details that might reveal residents' aspirations and pretensions. The book he has written seems meant to appeal to readers of The New York Observer's popular column Manhattan Transfers or The Los Angeles Times's Hot Property. It seems meant to appeal to happy homeowners' Schadenfreude and to less fortunate readers' envy and social voyeurism.
When Mr. Gaines sticks to reporting changes in New York's real estate landscape, the result is an entertaining chronicle of the current boom, which many have warned is a bubble about to burst. He seasons his narrative with lots of informative little tidbits: that the west side of Park Avenue is considered to be the better side of the street; that the United Nations Plaza once had a rule prohibiting residents from cooking in a wok; that one snooty building turned down a prospective buyer because he'd had the bad taste to apply for a J. C. Penney charge card.
The book is also peppered with lots of celebrity anecdotes: from the uproar caused in 1999 by the decision of the board of the once stuffy 820 Fifth Avenue to approve clothing designer Tommy Hilfiger to the agita caused at 55 Central Park West by Donna Karan's three-year renovation of her newly purchased apartment to reports that Steven Spielberg tried to renovate the view from his San Remo apartment by offering to pay another building to redo the dilapidated water tower on its roof.
Halfway through the volume, however, Mr. Gaines seems to lose focus on his subject. The narrative devolves into a succession of meandering profiles of well-known real estate brokers (including Linda Stein, Alice Mason, Edward Lee Cave, Dolly Lenz, Dottie Herman and Michael Shvo) and a series of long historical digressions about individual buildings like the Ansonia, digressions that are heavily indebted to earlier books like Elizabeth Hawes's charming "New York, New York: How the Apartment House Transformed the Life of the City" (1993).
To make matters worse, "The Sky's the Limit" is littered with small mistakes and outdated descriptions. For instance, Mr. Gaines writes of Manhattan's Upper West Side that "it's guerrilla theater on every block" and that there are "dramatic displays of wealth and poverty everywhere, including many homeless and emotionally ill people on the streets," a description that might have been apt a decade or two ago but that hardly applies to this willfully yuppified neighborhood today.
His description of Central Park West as a "six-lane boulevard" is misleading (it's six lanes wide only if one counts the rows of parked cars on either side of the street) and a picture caption incorrectly notes that Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade balloons are inflated at "a small park across Eighty-second Street."
Such stumbles only contribute to the sense that "The Sky's the Limit" is less a full-fledged, carefully considered book than a hastily assembled collection of magazinelike stories about the Monopoly game of New York real estate.

A Welcoming Place to Raise a Family

July 31, 2005 New York Times

By ELSA BRENNER

EACH weekday evening, as Madeline Urena, a detective with the New York City Police Department, drives north to her home in New City, N.Y., she unwinds from the day's pressures by watching the cityscapes of Manhattan yield to the lush landscapes along the Palisades Interstate Parkway. It is a commute that functions like a decompression chamber, she said.
"By the time I pull up to my front door in Rockland County," Detective Urena said, "a sense of peace has finally returned."
After renting an apartment in the Bronx for a year, Detective Urena and her husband, John, also a detective with the city's Police Department, decided to move to the town of Clarkstown, where many of their colleagues on the force also live.
The Urenas bought a four-bedroom, two-bath, vinyl-clad Cape Cod on one-third of an acre in New City, a hamlet in Clarkstown, for about $400,000 - "much less than it would have cost for that size house in Westchester or Bergen County," she said. "And the first day we moved in, neighbors stopped by to welcome us, which made us feel right at home."
Although New City, the seat of government for both the town of Clarkstown and for Rockland County, has little of the scenic charm of Nyack or Piermont, two Hudson River waterfront communities, it is known for its schools. And because of the relatively high test scores of its public school students, New City has earned a reputation as a good place to raise a family.
Jody and Howard Bauer, who have three sons - Matt, 19, Mitch, 16, and Scott, 12 - first bought a small colonial in the hamlet about 15 years ago. Mrs. Bauer, a stay-at-home mother, is active in district PTA groups. She said that the public schools at all grade levels in Clarkstown "not only accept but actually welcome parents' input."
What You'll Find
Once the opulent vistas along the Palisades highway are left behind, the scenes along New City's local roadways become more prosaic. The hamlet is a community of 34,000 residents, with mostly strip malls and housing developments, a few condominium town house complexes, and an occasional historic home with a rambling stone fence gracing a back road.
The composer Kurt Weill and his wife, the singer Lotte Lenya, bought one of those rustic stone houses in 1941 and spent time there until their deaths (he in 1950 and she in 1981). The playwright Maxwell Anderson also lived in the hamlet.
For the most part, though, New City is an unprepossessing suburb that attracts middle-class residents who are priced out of more expensive housing markets elsewhere, said Richard Landman, an associate real estate agent for Century 21 Grand in New City.
Even though most neighborhoods in New City are modest, they are generally well-maintained, with tidy front yards, close-cropped front lawns and houses with freshly painted shutters.
In all, Clarkstown encompasses 41 square miles and includes the hamlets of Bardonia, Central Nyack, Congers, Nanuet, New City, Rockland Lake, Valley Cottage, West Nyack, all of the Village of Upper Nyack, and portions of the Villages of Nyack and Spring Valley.
After the construction of the Tappan Zee Bridge in 1955, and the Palisades Interstate Parkway and the Garden State Parkway extension in the years following, the population of Clarkstown grew rapidly, reaching 83,000 in 2000, according to the most recent census data.
What You'll Pay
Currently, there are 127 single-family homes for sale in the hamlet, ranging in price from $299,900 for a two-bedroom, one-bath cottage on a quarter of an acre to $3.8 million for a six-bedroom, five-and-a-half-bath brick colonial on 1.8 acres. The median price for a single-family home in New City is $539,500, up from $453,000 last year and $344,000 in 2001.
Housing prices are more reasonable than in other suburbs close to New York City. In Westchester, for example, the median sales price was $700,000 at the end of the second quarter of this year. In Rockland, it was $489,000, according to the Greater Hudson Valley Multiple Listing Service.
Last year, the Bauers moved up to a larger house, a four-bedroom colonial on an acre. Mrs. Bauer would not say what she and her husband paid for their new home, but comparable houses in the neighborhood have recently sold for $700,000 to $750,000, real estate agents said.
One of the most desirable neighborhoods in New City is a former summer cottage community of about 50 houses surrounding Lake Lucille. The neighborhood has its own beach and private gravel roads.
A renovated cottage near Lake Lucille, livable year round, goes for $500,000 to $800,000, according to Mr. Landman and his wife, Gloria, who own a small Cape Cod across from the lake.
The most expensive homes in New City are along Sky Drive, running upward of $1 million and affording expansive views of the Hudson Valley.
Although there are four town house condominium complexes in the hamlet, with a total of 500 units, none are on the market. When they do come on, though, a two-bedroom unit would sell for about $400,000, Mr. Landman said.
"Over all, with all types of houses in New City," Mr. Landman said, "you not only get more for your buck, but you can also find more land to go with the house and lower taxes."
As an example, taxes on a mid-range house - a four-bedroom, two-bath split level on about one-third of an acre, on the market for $439,000 - are estimated at $7,500 a year.
The typical two-bedroom rental apartment costs about $1,500; a one-bedroom rents for about $1,300. There are 14 rentals available, according to figures provided by Century 21 Grand.
The Schools
Most children in New City attend the Clarkstown Central School District, which covers 31 square miles and encompasses New City, West Nyack, Bardonia, Congers and parts of Nanuet and Nyack. About 9,600 pupils are enrolled in the district's 10 elementary schools, a middle school (Grades 6 to 8) and two senior high schools.
Close to 70 percent of the graduating seniors at Clarkstown South and Clarkstown North High Schools attend four-year colleges, with another 27 percent going on to two-year community colleges. At Clarkstown South High School, students taking the SAT's scored 563 on the math section and 531 on the verbal section. At Clarkstown North, the scores were 573 and 549, respectively. Statewide, the average SAT score was 510 for math and 496 for verbal.
The Commute
Commuters using public transportation to New York City have a choice of bus, train or ferry service. The latter is a 20-minute ride from Haverstraw across the Hudson to Ossining, where the Metro-North Railroad runs regularly to and from Grand Central Terminal.
Another option includes traveling by bus or by train from Nanuet to Hoboken or Secaucus, N.J., for a link into Manhattan, which takes about an hour and 15 minutes.
But many commuters, like Detective Urena, prefer to drive down the Palisades Parkway, over the George Washington Bridge and into Manhattan. Depending on the time of day and the amount of traffic, the commute by car can take as much as an hour or more, or as little as 30 minutes.
What To Do
The 30-acre public Zukor Park is the epicenter of New City residents' recreational life, boasting a community center, two lighted ball fields for nighttime Little League games, basketball courts and a playground, among other things. "Zukor Park is what New City is all about," said Mrs. Landman, who is also a real estate agent for Century 21 Grand. "It's about family."
In Clarkstown, there are 700 acres of parkland, four community centers, three outdoor pools, three picnic areas, 12 ball fields, a soccer field and five playgrounds. Germond Park in nearby West Nyack has two swimming pools, a water slide, a miniature golf course and ball fields, among other things, on 78 acres.
As for dining, even though New City offers only the basics - not much more than a local pizza parlor - fine restaurants and theater abound in Nyack, less than 10 minutes away by car.
"It's easy to go to Nyack for dinner and to attend a production at the Helen Hayes Theater," Mrs. Bauer said. "There are great dancing spots, too."
As for shopping, New City offers just the basics in that department as well, but nearby West Nyack is home to the Palisades Center, the largest mall in the tristate area. Shopping along Route 17 in northern New Jersey is also an option.
The History
Clarkstown was created by an act of the State Legislature in 1791, during George Washington's first term as president. Since Rockland did not become a county until seven years later, the municipality was at first part of Orange County.
What We Liked
Middle-income wage-earners are not priced out of New City's housing market, as they would be in most sections of Westchester County.
What We'd Change
New City needs a stronger commercial focal point, and it looks as if it will get one. The town and county are drawing up a revitalization proposal that is to include additional municipal parking, new facades for storefronts and new sidewalks and street lighting. They say the goal is to strike a balance in the suburb: to enhance commerce and attract new ventures but not to create sprawl.

New Frontier : Deep Inside China, American Family Struggles to Cope

(Photo) Laurel and John Larsen and their children, James, 4 years old, Emma, 6, (standing) and Eliza, 2, held by her father, wear Chinese-style clothes made by a local tailor.

By JAMES T. AREDDY Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

August 2, 2005; Page A1

CHONGQING, China -- As one of Ford Motor Co.'s managers in China, 30-year-old John Larsen is exposing his family to a culture they couldn't imagine back home in a Michigan suburb.
But when his wife and kids -- ages 2, 4 and 6 -- moved here last September, they preferred to stay inside a 19th-floor Hilton hotel suite, where the family lived for nine months. The rarity of fair-complexioned, American children on the sidewalks of the gritty industrial city of Chongqing makes the Larsen family a crowd-stopping spectacle.
"It's not very fun and my kids hate it," says their mother, Laurel, 31. Over a bowl of her homemade vegetarian chili in the five-star Hilton, the Cincinnati-born woman added, "When we go home and close the door, we feel like we are back in America."
As corporate ambitions bore deeper into China, foreign companies are sending families to less-developed cities like Chongqing. Such places offer huge, untapped markets for companies. They also provide accelerated career opportunities to young executives eager to punch their ticket on the way to upper management. But the postings can feel like a detour into isolation and culture shock for some families.
Chongqing is a city of 32 million people, but Westerners are still rare here. The city is nearly 900 miles west of Shanghai, and about a decade behind it in terms of economic prosperity. So-called bang-bang men hang out on the streets, hungry to earn a few cents lugging stones, machinery or even garbage on their bamboo poles. Residents walk on sidewalks covered in cooking oil and spittle. Even the weather isn't a selling point: Fog trapped in by the surrounding mountains creates generally soupy skies, made worse by pollution.
American companies are drawn to cities like Chongqing because they are cheap; the average annual wage here is $1,500, about half of what it is in Shanghai. Merchandisers see markets for all kinds of products. In Chongqing, for example, car ownership is just 1.3 per 100 people, a fifth of the rate in Beijing.
A tall, confident man with wispy brown hair, Mr. Larsen sees many benefits to the move. He likes his job, developing marketing strategy for Ford. He's glad his children are seeing a different way of life. The private school that the older two kids attend provides an excellent education, he and his wife agree.
Still, the adjustment has been more challenging than they expected. "We thought we would be eating a lot of Chinese food and the kids would be learning Chinese quickly because they'd be immersed," says Mr. Larsen. So far, that hasn't happened.
A marble lobby dominated by a waterfall and piano bar makes the Hilton the swankiest address in this part of China. English is the first language and a concierge takes care of smoothing over any rough spots. A blue-lettered "WELCOME" mat marked the entrance to the Larsen's three-bedroom suite, converted from six guest rooms. It cost $4,300 a month, paid mostly by Ford. When the family needed to step outside, their driver, Jojo, waited in a black Ford Mondeo sedan, provided by the company.
Ford picks up most of the rent for its expatriate employees and encourages them to live in hotels because the conveniences help workers "remain focused on running the business," says Ron Tyack, a senior Ford executive in China.
Expat perks are being scaled back in cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and especially Hong Kong, parts of China where rapid development has made it easier for foreigners to adjust. But perks remain a must to lure Americans and their families to cities like Chongqing.
Shanghai and Beijing each have a dozen international schools, many with hundreds of students. Chongqing has one international school, in a converted house, with 40 pupils ages 2 to 17. Ten hospitals in Beijing offer foreign-grade medical care. Chongqing has a single Western-style clinic, located in the Hilton, that rotates a different doctor through every few months. Even breathing is easier in Shanghai. Chongqing has 88 fewer days of good-quality air than Shanghai during the average year, according to Chinese government statistics.
Perhaps most shocking: The Starbucks chain, which boasts nearly 100 coffee shops between Beijing and Shanghai, doesn't have one in Chongqing.
In recent years, "the demographics of the expats have changed," says Joseph Verga, a 45-year-old financial controller for Ford, who lives in Chongqing. When he moved here two years ago, "there wasn't a baby" among his U.S. co-workers, he says.
Shortly after Mr. Verga and his 42-year-old wife Marybeth were dispatched to China, they trekked through Tibet. She filled their apartment with paintings from Vietnam and a clay warrior statue from Xian in western China. But after Ms. Verga became pregnant, she decided she didn't want to go to a Chinese hospital. So this spring, two months before her due date, she flew home to Detroit to give birth to her son in a U.S. hospital. "There's not one thing that's the same," about Chongqing and the U.S., she says.
Before Ford started making cars here in 2003, the city -- familiar overseas as "Chungking" -- hadn't seen so much foreign attention since serving as an allied supply post in World War II. Decaying hillside mansions are a reminder that Chongqing was a capital for the Nationalist government before the civil war that brought communists to power in 1949. Today Chongqing is the main jumping-off point for tourist cruises on the Yangtze River toward the famed Three Gorges Dam.
The government is eager to boost interest in places like Chongqing, which gets just 5% of the $8 billion of foreign direct investment that Shanghai takes in annually.
The first time either of the Larsens saw China was when Ford flew them to Chongqing last summer for a visit after his job offer. The couple, who have been married eight years, realized they would be in for a big change. But there was never really much debate whether he would take the job. Ms. Larsen jokes that she knew that in accepting his marriage proposal she was also agreeing to someday follow him to China.
Her husband caught the China bug after being assigned by the Mormon Church to do missionary work in Taiwan at age 19. While there, he learned to speak and read Chinese. Today he speaks Mandarin Chinese well enough to conduct business meetings. Before moving to China, Ms. Larsen's international experience consisted of living in London for 18 months and a vacation to Cancún, Mexico.
Like many foreigners in town, Ms. Larsen says she won't touch Chongqing's signature cuisine: "huoguo," or hot pot -- a fondue-like dish so loaded with fiery chilies that its aroma seems permanently suspended in Chongqing's air, along with diesel fumes. Supermarkets feature chicken feet jutting out of crushed ice and slabs of pork dangling from sharp hooks.
Neatly dressed in slacks, a black argyle V-neck and bright white blouse, Ms. Larsen shows off her solution to the food challenge: A closet full of cans, stacked to the ceiling, with labels like Green Giant, Crisco and Hormel -- items lugged to Chongqing in suitcases or mailed from overseas. Her birthday present in February was a silver, side-by-side U.S.-sized refrigerator-freezer.
Laurel and John Larsen and their children, James, 4 years old, Emma, 6, (standing) and Eliza, 2, held by her father, wear Chinese-style clothes made by a local tailor.
Food is a bargain in Chongqing. Ms. Larsen spends only $50 to $100 a week on groceries, compared with $200 to $300 in Michigan. With the help of her small network of expat wives, she has found one store that has Oreo cookies and another that stocks Fruit Loops cereal and canned refried beans. The children see little in the markets that resembles the food they remember back home. Ms. Larsen says they don't give her much sass when she tells them: "here's what you're eating."
Recently, the Larsens faced an important new food complication. Four-year-old James was diagnosed with celiac disease during the family's summer visit back to the U.S. The boy now needs a diet free of gluten, which is found in wheat. In the U.S., Ms. Larsen prepared two cartons of special wheat-free foods to take back to Chongqing.
Entertainment in Chongqing is hard to find, the Larsens say. At a drive-through "safari park," the children looked through car windows and watched tigers devour live chickens tossed from a ranger's jeep. Enthusiasm about visiting pandas was marred, Ms. Larsen says, by seeing the zoo's grubby bathrooms. The Larsens attended a Chinese opera, featuring two actors with painted faces, one in a horse costume. Tickets cost only $2, but the family, unimpressed, left at intermission.
One pastime Ms. Larsen has designed for 2-year-old Eliza is spotting dogs near the Hilton hotel. A look down an alley found no animals one Tuesday. After an hour, the little girl had glimpsed two mutts. "He's going to his house," Eliza said as a scruffy brown dog jostled along a sidewalk crowded with scaffolding equipment.
Chinese men and women made way for the tot to amble down on the sidewalk. Nearly everyone reacted to the rare sight of a foreign child, pointing, giggling, staring and sometimes touching her. "Eliza's kind of like the monkey on show," her mother said.
Ms. Larsen and her daughter took a route back to the Hilton over a pedestrian bridge, where merchants sell sunglasses, combs and belts. One woman's habit is to thrust a mirror into the little girl's hand each time they pass, Ms. Larsen says. She says she feels obligated to buy it, even though she is tiring of the routine. At first, the woman asked only one yuan for a mirror, Ms. Larsen says, but now she charges eight yuan, about 99 cents, for each one.
As Ms. Larsen settled up, a middle-aged man bent down for a closer look at Eliza, while a bang-bang man leaned on his bamboo stick and watched. An elderly passerby gave Eliza's cheek a quick pinch. Everyone tried to be friendly, but Eliza, unsmiling, said nothing. She kept her head down, eyes fixed on the new mirror.
Foreigners are such a rarity in Chongqing that even Ms. Larsen gawks at times: "There's a Westerner we don't know," she says, on one drive through town. Only about 25 of Ford's 2,500 employees in Chongqing are foreigners. The Larsens say they know literally every expat family living here.
Ms. Larsen says she hasn't learned enough Chinese in her two hours of weekly lessons to make even basic points to the family baby sitter. She often calls her husband on the cellphone to seek translation help. Looking over the skyscrapers outside the hotel window, she says, "Real life is happening out there, and I'm not connected." Even so, she adds, "What would I do out there?"
Her offer to volunteer at an orphanage was turned down, she says. Her major diversion is teaching two Pilates-style exercise classes each week for expat women, plus dance classes for little girls. Instead of paying her, a few dollars are collected per class for a local school for the blind.
A centerpiece of expat social life is a Wednesday "ladies' lunch," where funds are raised for the blind school and news is swapped about which store has taco shells or sour cream. The women make visits to the fabric market, using calculators to bargain, then use gestures to show a tailor what they want made.
While she hasn't made friends with locals, Ms. Larsen says she values her new expat friends. They are people who simply wouldn't be in her orbit back home, she says, including a woman from Cuba and a woman closer to her mother's age.
From the Hilton, every morning a white van picked up the older two children, Emma and James, for the 20-minute drive to the place in China they enjoy most: school. Ms. Larsen prizes the 7-to-1 student-teacher ratio at the Yew Chung International School, which Ford covers at an annual cost of $13,000 per child.
National flags wrap along the ceiling of Yew Chung School. Children from a dozen countries sit shoulder-to-shoulder at little desks. Emma's class groups 5-, 6- and 7-year-olds. She studies Chinese each day and practices with her father at night. She is reading English above her U.S. grade level.
"I think I'm going to be a snob when I go home and walk into the public school," Ms. Larsen says. "They go a lot faster [here]."
With two years still to go on their assignment, the Larsens recently decided to move out of the Hilton and into a five-bedroom house in a new gated community designed for expatriates. Ford pays almost all of the rent. The couple say they want their kids to have a more "American" experience, in particular a yard to play in and the responsibility to clean it up. There's also a local pool and a playground in the area.
Mr. Larsen has recently needed to spend part of each week at Ford's new plant in Nanjing, several hours away by plane, near China's east coast. Ms. Larsen says his absences sharpen the isolation she feels in the new house, away from the helpful, English-speaking Hilton staff. But she says she accepts that her husband's new assignment is a sign of his value to Ford.
The Larsens credit life in Chongqing with deepening their family ties. "We have to be friends with each other," Mr. Larsen says. They have taken trips to Thailand and South Korea, and made plans to visit Bali and Hong Kong's new Disneyland. Ms. Larsen says she is also trying to get out of urban Chongqing more on weekends, going to places such as parks around the mountainous region.
But they are always aware how far they are from home. Mr. and Ms. Larsen returned from dinner one evening to a find a poem from their 6-year-old daughter Emma, complete with a child's misspellings, taped to their bed-stand. It read:
Amarica is my place!I love Amarica.It was fun.It was so fun.I miss it.I miss my frieds.I love Amarica.Amarica was my place and it still is my place.

Write to James T. Areddy at james.areddy@wsj.com