Copacabana: Getting a Facelift

July 19, 2011 | Filed underReal Estate | Posted by Contributing Reporter

By Sarah de Sainte Croix, Contributing Reporter

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Copacabana, perhaps the most famous of all of Rio’s beach-side neighborhoods, needs little introduction, but since its hey-day in the 1930s the glamor has been gradually giving way to a grittier reality, and the glitterati have moved on down the beach to Ipanema. However, the neighborhood is undergoing a quiet metamorphosis in anticipation of the Olympic Games in 2016 that is slowly putting the shine back.

The Copacabana Palace Hotel - the symbol of the neighborhood's illustrious past, photo by Yusuke Kawasaki/Flickr Creative Commons License.

One of the most significant changes the neighborhood has witnessed in recent years is the pacification of its surrounding favelas. In 2009 the favelas Babilônia and Chapéu Mangueira overlooking Copacabana’s eastern-most tip, and Pavão-Pavãozinho and Cantagalo at the south-western end were amongst the first favelas to be occupied by theUPP (Police Pacification Force) in the city’s Zona Sul (South Zone), significantly improving the safety and security in the area.

Copacabana resident Priscila Paiva commented, “I used to see a lot more crimes going on in the street, like people buying and selling drugs in broad daylight. I’m sure it’s still going on to some extent, but it seems a lot less obvious now.”

The second major change for Copacabana was the inauguration in February this year of “BRS Copacabana” (Bus Rapid System) – a new system of bus lanes on Copacabana’s main arterial roads, Avenida Nossa Senhora de Copacabana going north, and Ruas Barata Ribeiro and Raul Pompeia going south.

Paiva says, “The traffic in Copacabana was notorious. My commute to work has definitely improved. It can still be chaotic and the bus drivers still drive far too quickly, but it’s a step in the right direction.”

The beach is also receiving a major facelift courtesy of Orla Rio’s project to renovate Copacabana’s beach-side kiosks. The new kiosks are made from stainless steel and glass allowing a view through from all angles, and they feature subterranean kitchens and public bathrooms.

One of Copacabana's renovated beach-side kiosks, photo by Skellig2008/Flickr Creative Commons License.

But while all the signs point towards a shiny new future for Copacabana, David Eger from Rio Apartment Rental urges an honest caution to those thinking of investing in property in the neighborhood. “I’d wait to see what happens in the next year, due to the huge increases in real estate values experienced in the past couple years. The bubble might burst. Of course if you find a great deal, go for it, but, buyer beware here….no mortgage insurance.”

Indeed, rental prices have gone up by over 100 percent since The Rio Times’ last survey in April 2010. Then, a basic one-bedroom apartment started from around R$500 per month. Now the starting price is in the region of R$1,200 per month, not including condo fees and taxes.

Purchase prices have also demonstrated dramatic increases. One-bedroom apartments start at around R$200,000 for just 28 to 30 square meters, and a two-bedroom will set you back upwards of R$400,000 for 60 to 100 square meters – an increase of over R$100,000 on last year’s figures.

However, Eger goes on to say, “The population of Copacabana is aging…this may prevail as an opportunity for more affluent and worldly people to purchase, remodel and rebuild this world-famous, beautiful location.”

  shareshare

Cost of Living Soars in Brazil

August 2, 2011 | Filed underBusiness | Posted by Contributing Reporter

By Sarah de Sainte Croix, Senior Contributing Reporter

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Brazil’s two biggest cities, Rio and São Paulo, have been ranked amongst the top fifteen most expensive cities in the world for expats, according to Mercer’s Worldwide Cost of Living Survey published last month. The report has Luanda, Angola as the world’s most expensive city for expatriates in the second year in a row, and for the Americas, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil top the list.

With soaring real estate costs and strong real against the dollar, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro are the most expensive cities in the Americas, image recreation.

The survey ranks São Paulo as the tenth most expensive city in the world (up eleven places since last year), and Rio de Janeiro as the twelfth (rising seventeen places). New York, North America’s most expensive city, lags far behind in just 32nd place, making Brazil the most expensive country in the Americas. London and Paris occupy eighteenth and 27th place, respectively.

The Mercer Report, which is published annually, is designed to help multinational companies and governments determine compensation allowances for their expatriate employees. It measures the comparative cost of 200 items in each of the 214 cities covered by the survey against prices in New York City. These items include housing, transport, food, clothing, household goods and entertainment.

Brazil’s astronomical rise through the rankings can be explained in part by the recent housing boom. Property prices in Rio de Janeiro have risen by 16.1 percent since last year, and rental prices have gone up by around 100 percent in some areas of the Zona Sul.

Nathalie Constantin-Métral, the survey’s senior researcher, commented, “The cost of housing – often the biggest expense for expatriates – plays an important part in determining where cities are ranked”.

Because the findings are measured against a base line in New York, another crucial factor is the growing strength of the real against the dollar. Mercers says, “The US dollar has weakened significantly against some currencies, including the Brazilian real. So the Cost of Living indices for U.S. expatriates will continue to increase to reflect the need to use more U.S. dollars to buy the same number of host currency units.”

Brazil's Big Macs are the second most expensive in the world, photo by John Sember/Flickr Creative Commons License.

A third factor is the ever increasing cost of goods and services in Brazil. A recent survey by Veja magazine found the average cost of a forty inch LED TV screen in Brazil to be R$2,000, compared to R$1,700 in France and R$1,100 in the United States.

Similarly, a minute’s cell phone talk time costs on average R$0.60 in Brazil, R$0.44 in France, and in the U.S., just R$0.17. A Brazilian Big Mac is also amongst the most expensive in the world, second only to Switzerland.

In global terms, Brazil’s inflation rate (currently at around six percent) is relatively high, but even with this in mind, prices are still soaring. Businesses blame increasing logistics, utility and rental costs, combined with high staffing costs as a result of Brazil’s employment laws, which are tipped very much in favor of the employee.

High taxes are another determining factor. On the price of a car in Brazil, for example, the consumer will pay around thirty percent of the total value as taxes, compared to sixteen percent in France, and just six percent in the U.S.

British expat Rebecca Smythe commented, “I only buy clothes and things when I go back to England – it’s just too expensive here now. I am struggling to afford my rent even.”

  shareshare

Brazil wins the gold medal in gridlock

President Dilma Rousseff, seeking to modernize the country's transportation network, has sold three major state-owned airports to private interests.

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Traffic jams the center of Sao Paulo, Brazil, last year. Brazil's inadequate transportation network is beginning to drag on its economic boom. (Luiz Guarnieri, Agencia Estado / February 25, 2011)

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By Vincent Bevins, Los Angeles Times

April 7, 2012, 8:12 p.m.

SAO PAULO, Brazil — If you plan to fly somewhere in Brazil on a busy weekend, you'd better be prepared to wait. At some airports, up to a third of the flights can be canceled or delayed.

If you choose to drive, you'll sit in traffic. The 50-mile trip from Sao Paulo to nearby beaches for the Carnaval holiday this year took as long as five hours.

If you're counting on the planned bullet train between Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, good luck with that. It won't be ready when Brazil hosts soccer's 2014 World Cup. In fact, the transportation minister said recently that it won't be operating until 2022, at the earliest.

And if you're a farmer, whose commodities are helping fuel Brazil's export boom, you'd better count on up to a third of your harvest falling out of trucks navigating bumpy old roads on the way to market. Then you might wait for days at overwhelmed ports to unload the rest.

Explosive growth has pulled 30 million Brazilians out of poverty in the last decade, propelling the nation to a position as the world's sixth-largest economy. Its up-and-coming global role will be highlighted when President Dilma Rousseffvisits Washington this week.

But the country's transportation network is woefully lacking. Now, with the World Cup looming and Brazil preparing to host the Summer Olympics only two years later, Rousseff has launched an effort to modernize it, selling off three major state-owned airports to private interests.

Rousseff's party still balks at the word "privatization," with many officials asserting that the airport deal was only a "concession." That attitude is a reflection of a backlash across Latin America against U.S.-backed "neoliberal" free-market policies that dominated the region in the 1980s and '90s.

Analysts say pitiful infrastructure is keeping Brazil from even faster growth and that action is needed on the country's other transportation bottlenecks. But even limited privatization is a hard sell to unions and other hard-core supporters of Rousseff's Workers' Party. It's unclear how much further Rousseff, a former leftist rebel, might go.

"These are strategic national assets," said union leader Ubiraci Dantas de Oliveira. "And we have bad memories of previous privatizations."

Demonstrators gathered in early February in front of the Sao Paulo stock exchange, waving red flags as the airport in the capital, Brasilia, and two Sao Paulo-area airports, Guarulhos and Viracopos, were auctioned off. South African, French and Argentine companies are paying $14.2 billion for them, much more than Brazil was seeking.

By reaching out to the business community, Rousseff was using a strategy employed by her mentor and predecessor, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, a former union organizer who combined pragmatic, business-friendly policies with the traditional social goals of the left. He finished his second term in 2010 with sky-high approval ratings.

With Brazil expecting an influx of foreign visitors for the World Cup in two years, airports were the most pressing concern.

Even after the airport auction, Jerome Valcke, general secretary of FIFA, the world soccer authority, caused a scandal in Brazil by saying the country needed a "kick up the backside" to prepare for 2014.

Airport privatization "is a very big deal," said Tony Volpon, a New York-based economist for international bank Nomura Securities. "But the question is if this is a one-time thing, because of the World Cup, or if it is the beginning of a bigger movement that could be exported to other airports, roads and ports. Because there is so much that needs to be done."

Brazil needs up to a trillion dollars in infrastructure investment to reduce its production costs and ensure sustainable growth, said Jerome Booth, head of research at Ashmore Investment Management in London.

Signs of Brazil's infrastructure needs are everywhere.

On the way to the beach for Carnaval in February, Sao Paulo drivers had time to get out of their cars to chat or buy snacks from vendors in the middle of the freeway. City residents often say they won't even try leaving town on a busy weekend because the traffic is just too bad.

Farmers export more than $75 billion in commodities every year, much of it to Asia. But they say they could do even better — and the country would prosper even more — if it didn't take longer to transport their goods across Brazil than it does to get them from the port to China.

Rousseff took office promising to rein in her predecessor's spending, even while tackling problems in infrastructure, healthcare, education and safety.

As unsettling as the airport sales were to her base, she remains extremely popular.

"We criticize when we think she's committing an error," said Dantas de Oliveira, speaking at the union headquarters. "But we would never deny that she and Lula have represented huge steps forward for us."

THE ONLY BLACK MAN TO DIE ON THE TITANIC

The Laroche Family

Miss Louise Laroche A Haitian French Family Which Traveled in Second Class Aboard Titanic Miss Louise Laroche was an Honour Member of the Titanic Historical Society from the beginning until her death in 1998. Since she could not speak English, correspondence over the years was thin. When a young man from France joined the Titanic Historical Society who spoke fluent English, Edward Kamuda asked Olivier Mendez if he would pay her a visit and her story was published originally in the Titanic Commutator in 1995.     The Titanic Historical Society receives inquiries from time to time asking if there were any black passengers onboard. The answer is yes and contrary to popular assumptions, the family traveled in second class. I found out that Louise's father was the only black passenger on the Titanic. Joseph LaRoche, the nephew of the President of Haiti, was born there in 1889. He received his engineering degree in France and married a wine seller's daughter, Juliette. As a black man, LaRoche had few opportunities for employment as an engineer, and with two daughters -- Simonne and Louise -- and another child on the way, he decided to move the family to his native Haiti. LaRoche's mother purchased first-class tickets for them on the La France ocean liner. Since children had to eat separately in the dining arrangements on that ship, the LaRoche family exchanged the tickets for second-class tickets on the new ship, The Titanic, where families could stay together. Most of the second-class passengers (The Titanic was the most expensive ship with the best first class suites costing more than $70,000 in today's dollars) were successful business people and community leaders. So, as with so many issues that surrounded the sinking of the Titanic (the lookouts forgetting their binoculars, the iceberg puncturing six compartments when the ship would have survived with up to four damaged ones, not having enough lifeboats, the ship traveling too fast, etc.), it was a fateful combination of factors that led to the LaRoche family being on board April 14, 1912. LaRoche was able to get his family into one of the last lifeboats (thus my ticketed passenger "Miss Louise LaRoche" was on the list of about 700 survivors at the end of the exhibit), but he was among the more than 1,500 that died, many of hypothermia in the freezing ocean water. Juliette and the children returned to France where they lived in poverty until 1918, when the White Star Line gave her a settlement, which would have amounted to $254,000 today. Reportedly, she lived in fear and mourning the rest of her life until her death in 1980. "My passenger," Louise, grew up to work for the Justice Department in France. The most fascinating aspect of this whole story is that few people ever knew there was a black passenger on the Titanic. Upon return to France, the LaRoche family maintained a tradition of not talking about it. None of the press or witness reports mentioned a black passenger. LaRoche's body was not among the many recovered after the sinking. Most of the information I've cited comes from the work of historian Judith Geller. LaRoche's story was not revealed until the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry and the Titanic Historical Society staged this exhibit in 2000. The LaRoches and other black passengers were the subject of discrimination on the Titanic, as they had been on shore. The White Star Line issued an apology about derogatory behavior of the crew towards these people, even as the ship was sinking. Controversy in the black community surrounded the opening of the exhibit here in Phoenix, because reportedly LaRoche's story was not highlighted in the exhibit, as it had been in other parts of the country. The Arizona Science Center said the problem was lack of time to put up all the material, rather than deliberate omission. They promised to correct it. Whatever the reason, it would have been ironic if Joseph LaRoche were ignored again, 89 years after the demise of a ship that was labeled as "practically unsinkable." A picture of the LaRoche family: Mr. LaRoche presumably sank with the Titanic. Mrs. LaRoche and the two daughters survived. There is a fascinating account of the family here: http://www.titanic1.org/people/louise-laroche.asp  Beyond that, I am not aware of any other black passengers. There is an oral legend about a black boiler room worker named "Shine" (who survived through his cannyness), but that apprears to be apocryphal.