Out of the ruins --- FT. By Rachel Morarjee

Real estate prices in Kabul were higher than Tokyo or New York as thousands of international aid workers and consultants poured into the bombed out remains of the city. -- News agencies were paying thousands of dollars for one house with no running water and an unexploded rocket in the basement. --- Mirwais Ekhsani, a 22-year-old realtor who runs the Wazir Akbar Khan Property agency, recalls a time before the hardline Islamic regime ended when he rented a four-bedroom house to a Danish charity for $500 a month and danced with joy. By contrast; "in 2002, right after the Taliban fell, it was possible to rent a house like that for $15,000 a month." --- Still, many market observers see the correction as a positive development - a sign that Kabul is rebuilding and stabilising. Previously, the only viable place for foreigners to live was Wazir Akbar Khan, a neighbourhood in the eastern part of the city made famous by the best-selling novel The Kite Runner and seen as the Beverley Hills of Afghanistan in the 1960s. Because the area had been occupied by mujahedin commanders, many of its houses, with original fittings and swimming pools, survived and were eventually rented to embassies and aid organisations such as the International Committee of the Red Cross. --- Elsewhere, whole neighbourhoods destroyed by the fighting, such as Karte Char and Karte Se in western Kabul, have slowly been rebuilt, driving prices down and allowing foreign companies, aid agencies and their employees to move in. "Every house in Kabul has the same problems with water and electricity, so people are now thinking: 'Why not move to a district further west and pay half the price?' " says Naser Shahalemi, operational director of Gilbert Real Estate, a US-backed estate agency that does business all over the country. --- These re-emerging neighbourhoods are full of modest, three- or four-bedroom homes in streets that bustle with small tailor's shops, beauticians and fruit stalls only half and hour's drive away from Kabul's embassies and the United Nations offices. --- But evidence of the recent conflict remains. Sitting in the garden of his three-house compound in Karte Char, where roses are just coming into bloom, New York-based owner Torialai Popal points to the bullet marks in the property next door. "My houses were like that," he says. "It was an absolute disaster. It took a lot of work to make them habitable again." --- Ordinary Afghans are still strugging to recover. --- More development - not of expensive mansions but of standard homes and apartments and infrastructure - is desperately needed to serve the city's booming population. Thirty years ago, when Afghanistan was still a mecca for backpacking hippies, the capital had 750,000 residents. By 1999 it had 1.8m and, according to World Bank estimates, the number grew at 15 per cent per year for the next five years. Larger than the next 10 largest Afghan cities combined, it is now groaning under the weight of its own growth. --- Only 18 per cent of homes have access to running water, electricity is available less than one day in three in the winter months and the streets are full of sewage. Foreign aid agencies have moved in to help fix these problems but the side effect has been to push poor and even middle class Afghans out of the market. --- In Microrayon, a Soviet-built housing project that straddled the front line during the civil war, boxy two-bedroom flats rent for at least $300 a month, six times the average government official's salary.