The housing crisis in Beirut: Observers note with interest the signs of a building renaissance which for ten years now has been bursting forth in Beirut; and whoever descends from the sky at the international airport is seized with wonder at this steady ferment of building — as though Beirut were in a perpetual race with construction.

They say that this renaissance, going forward at full speed, has solved the housing crisis in the capital. Perhaps that is true... but at the same time it has created a crisis of another kind, suffered today by hundreds of

families who find no longed-for rest amid the din, the crowding, and the disorder; and these families, owing to their ties with Beirut, cannot bear to move far away from it. Where, then, is the one who will solve this crisis?

New building ideas applied in Lebanon: The answer to this question has been given by a select group of Lebanese citizens recently returned from Venezuela and Colombia, most of them engineers and land experts whose circumstances allowed them to observe at close hand the course of the astonishing building revolution that swept those countries and transformed Caracas and its suburbs, in a short span of time, into one of the beautiful capitals to be found in this age. These technical men brought back with them, on their return to Lebanon, a handful of bright new ideas, with the intention of applying them in the mother country; and they became the sound nucleus of a great company concerned with planning and erecting modern model villages.

Outside Beirut: The members of this company found, after study, exploration, and negotiation, that these model dwellings could not be erected in Beirut itself; the search had to turn to the quiet outskirts, where the hills are of modest height, where the climate is temperate the year round, and where, accordingly, one can live both summer and winter...

'The Green Hill': From here began their serious search for the spot answering to their conditions — and it was not long before they found it!... They found it exactly as it had appeared to their discriminating fancy — a sprawling hill clothed in evergreen pine, in a climate of moist breeze, than which nothing is gentler or more delicate!

And in the flood of their great joy they christened it: 'The Green Hill.' Straightway hundreds of feet set out to explore its expanses, and hundreds of eyes to feast upon its lush, virgin charms. And the new name took on descriptions and particulars: it lies nine kilometers from Beirut, on the Beit Mery road

past Mansouriyeh, and its boundaries begin at the 'Ras el-Metn' fork,