In an article fabulously titled "Pagan hasta US$ 1.000 por semana por alquilar en Capital" (if only they'd used an exclamation point!), Clarín points out one of the unpleasant truths of the recent tourist boom. Namely, that attracted by the possibility of quick money, many Buenos Aires apartment owners are switching their rental units to the tourist trade and raising the tourist prices high enough that they're no longer really the bargain that attracted people in the first place. As you can see in the grid above (assuming the numbers are true), locals pay 30-50% of the foreigner price, hence the attraction for renting to gringos, frogs and limeys. But it's not that easy. As Clarín notes, "Las desventajas son varias: hay mucha oferta, pagas expensas muy caras, la inversión inicial es alta y competís con hoteles cinco estrellas, por eso tenés que incluir servicios premium." Also, because so many people are doing this, many Argentines have been left without affordable places to stay.

Armando Pepe, titular de la inmobiliaria homónima, aporta: "antes los que alquilaban departamentos eran los que no accedían a un crédito y los estudiantes del interior. Ahora se sumaron los turistas, y los estudiantes y empresarios extranjeros. Más jugadores en la misma cancha. Hay muchos departamentos que se volcaron a este negocio y descuidaron el mercado interno", explica.

Foreign visitors too have taken to complaining. Take Claudia Boyd Barrett, a reporter in town on a journalism scholarship.

Cuenta que fue a ver un departamento mal iluminado, pequeño, sobre una avenida muy ruidosa y le quisieron cobrar U$S 550. "¡Un alquiler exagerado! Lo peor es que me hablaban de los precios como si fueran totalmente normales. En Miami un departamento de dos ambientes con salida a la playa cuesta más barato...

Con toda esta historia sus planes cambiaron radicalmente. Pensaba terminar de cursar la maestría y quedarse unos meses trabajando aquí en un medio local, pero eso no sucederá. Una vez que termine de estudiar regresará a Miami.

Not that short-term, foreigner-aimed apartments are a bad thing--my mother's stayed in several--but let's just say that it seems like a lot of people haven't learned that easy money is never that easy.

Three years of work headed by CONICET (Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas) has produced one of the coolest interactive web maps we've seen in a while, the Atlas Ambiental de Buenos Aires. Apparently it includes everything there is to know about the city and province. As the Saturday Clarín article noting its arrival cataloged:

Así, en una misma página de Internet se puede descubrir como Buenos Aires se fue poblando desde 1700; recorrer la historia del Teatro Colón o la Casa de Gobierno con imágenes satelitales incluidas; conocer el recorrido de las líneas de colectivos, subtes o trenes; comprobar a través de gráficos la evolución del subsuelo de Buenos Aires, o ver con imágenes animadas cómo se reproducen los mosquitos que hasta hace pocos días invadieron la Ciudad o que clase de cucarachas uno puede encontrar en su casa.

From 18th century maps to mosquito sex...what else could you want?

Births should be noted (as we did with Henry Emiliano "Quique" Mount), so let us take a moment to praise Wicked!? Buenos Aires, a bilingual arts and under culture rag conceived and produced by Javier Gover and an ample crew and containing among other things a Q&A with multimedia nutter (meant in nicest possible way) Fernando Peña, a nightlife agenda by WhatsUpBuenosAires, and a quick interview between yours truly and talented fotog Sebastián Friedman. Really a nicely designed mag (and I don't say that just because my name appears in it), so check it out (it's tabloid size and really pink) if you see it in stores around town.

Following the "Three Events=Trend" story, we'll take the publication of yesterday's Fearful rich keep poor at bay with gated homes and razor wire story in the Guardian as an excuse to ramble about the phenomenon of the gated communites--los countries--so popular in the Buenos Aires suburbs. The Guardian piece, which claims there to be 400 countries with 300,000 residents, follows on the heels of a February Clarín piece (Ya está fuera de las aulas la primera "generación country") and a Christmas Day NYT piece (A Widening Gap Erodes Argentina’s Egalitarian Image), all of which focus to various degrees on the increasing desigualidad and fear that create and are caused by the countries and the generation of hyper-protected children brought up in the weird bubble of country living. As the Guardian writer Rory Carroll notes:

Those outside the fences joke that the children inside think golf carts are mankind's main mode of transport and have no idea what traffic lights are for.

Film director Celina Murga, 34, who made the lovely, small film Ana y los otros, is now making Una semana solos (A Week Alone), a movie about gated community kids who are left unsupervised. It is, Carroll says, "more Lord of the Flies than Home Alone."

"The children growing up in these places are very different from others, they don't know how to behave in the real world," says Murga. "Instead of trying to build a circle of protection around them we need to build human beings who can deal with the world as it is. I want to show that this is a social crisis."

Not only do the kids grow up in surreal bubbles, the poverty and crime that the residents entered these sealed villages to avoid do not necessarily stay away: the outside castle-like barriers of many countries often serve as the perfect back wall to the shanty town villas oft-founded just outside (see picture, above) and often filled with the manual laborers who work inside during the day. And the crime rate? According to a February La Nación article (En lo que va del año, se cometió un delito cada tres días en algún country), there's a robbery every three days in a country.

One of the perennial scams of the Buenos Aires real estate market has long been to underreport the value of the property one is buying/selling in order to avoid paying taxes. The two document sale--where there's a "real" receipt and an "official" one--was accepted enough that "How much should we make this out for?" was considered not a dishonest question, but a rational and intelligent one. So when the government decided to put in various safeguards to ensure that the real value was noted--and the real taxes paid--it sent a shudder through some real estate agents who claimed such enforced honesty would kill the local real estate market. Well, the first results under the new laws are in, and they're fairly telling. After two months of falling reported values (down 10.9% and 39.5%) due, presumably, to the slowing pace of the real estate boom, the value reported in March jumped 73.8%. And year-over-year, while there were only 2.9% more sales, the value of the sales jumped 41.2%. Either the average property value has jumped over 40% in a year, or somebody wasn't exactly telling the truth last year. As one analyst in the story said, ""Se producen escrituraciones por montos más cercanos a los reales." ("This has produced filings for amounts closer to reality.")

We're back in Buenos Aires, after 8 great days touring in Salta, Jujuy and Tucumán. The photo above was taken at El Anfiteatro (aka, a rock formation w/ good acoustics) along the Quebrada de Cafayate. Note how Henry tells papi he's hungry.

Sneak preview of C's photos

A while back, a reader of our blog suggested that we check out Barcelona. Not the city per se, but the Argentine satirical biweekly magazine, the one with that memorable logo "A European Solution For Argentina's Problems" (so much better than "All The News That's Fit to Print") and the online polls like "How Will Maradona Die?" (Overdose / Cirrhosis / AIDS / Equestrian Accident / Killed By A Bullet Meant For Hugo Chavez). We did, and we've become readers. For those angloparlantes who aren't familiar with it, it's like The Onion, but with a harsher--and definitely porteño--political edge. Rather than mock midwestern dweebs who can't get laid or call center middle managers as The Onion might do, Barcelona goes for the socio-poltical jugular and hits enough to be worth a read. Among classically snide headlines like "The Iraqi Government Calls For Dialogue After Realizing That 'The Path of Attacks and Massacres Is Now Exhausted'", the magazine has articles like "More and More Residents Demand Their Neighborhood Be Named 'Palermo' Something", mocking at the growing desire to cash in on rising property rates and tourism by associating one's neighborhood with Palermo (i.e. calling Villa Crespo "Palermo Queens"). Barcelona's suggestions: Palermo Bronx for Ciudad Oculta, Palermo Deadtown for Mataderos, and, interestingly, Palermo Asshole for Villa Ortúzar. The story:
But the most cutting article in the last issue, for those of us who follow Argentine politics, was the following: a piece using Argentine's desire to become investor-friendly by becoming more economically predictable to mock President Kirchner's modifying of the annual inflation rate (supposedly by replacing a long-term stat chief with a political operative whose measurements would--and seem to--reflect a low inflation rate the President prefers to the one existing in reality). The article's title? "Aiming to 'Help Create a Predictable Country', the New Statistics Chief Will Release The Inflation Numbers For The Rest of 2007." If you're not laughing even a little, well, it's a bit of an inside joke.

I came across this article for University of Utah students, encouraging them to forget Europe and visit Buenos Aires instead. Why? "Buenos Aires, and the rest of Argentina for that matter, is the answer for destitute students seeking an affordable option for something new and promising in travel." Can't make this stuff up. Youth hostels rejoice: more business may be coming your way.

Earlier this week, I wrote my first post for Gridskipper about the $200,00 (US$ 65.00) menu--sin vino--at Patagonia Sur, which is obviously aimed at a different type of tourist: those who can't spend money fast enough.

Now, I don't begrudge my city its tourism trade, but I really hope my porteña accent improves enough so I can disassociate myself from both the bargain seeking and conspicuous consuming lot of them.