Zombie Buildings Shadow Spain's Economic Future,

[Liberal_in_LA]

Zombie Buildings Shadow Spain's Economic Future

By PAULO PRADA

BENIDORM, Spain—Torre Lugano, Spain's tallest residential tower, attracted buyers from here and abroad with glossy brochures promising a luxury building with a glass-walled elevator and sweeping views of this Mediterranean resort's turquoise waters.

The reality is very different. The garage floods, windows are drafty and backed-up toilets flood apartments with sewage. The glass elevator never materialized. Residents, some recently forced to shower in a communal rest room because the plumbing on their floors failed, are suing the developers for €28.2 million ($36.4 million), citing "construction defects."

Torre Lugano is a 420-foot-tall example of the gap between Spain's recent dreams of economic glory and its grim new reality. Some 1.5 million unfinished, unsold or unwanted residential units stand scattered across the country, products of a still-deflating housing bubble that threatens to undermine Spain's broader economy for years to come. It is the hangover after an epic fiesta, a period Spaniards now refer to as "cuando pensábamos que éramos ricos"—"when we thought we were rich."

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After more than 50 years of work, Vicente Villalba took his profits from the sale of a catering business and in 2004 bought a Torre Lugano apartment. He now hangs his clothes on children's hangers so that they fit in the narrow closets that were installed instead of the full-sized wardrobes advertised.

Recently, he toured a utility room that was originally supposed to be a clubhouse. He pointed in disbelief at a jerry-rigged joint between a large water pipe and a much smaller one. The second pipe, placed sloppily above electricity cables in a wiring tray, recently succumbed to the pressure from the bigger one, shorting out the circuits below and leaving entire floors without electricity.

"It's a giant rip-off," says Mr. Villalba of the tower. "It was all too good to be true."

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704476104575439783253733728.html

[LeftinOH]

1. Benidorm is an ugly blot on Spain, yuck:

It has a little of that dreary 'wanna-be' look that Dubai has mastered so well.