NAIROBI -- One recent Sunday, Paul Abeno, a mid-level computer sales executive, shuffled through aisles of brass cabinet pulls, colored tiles and tiny glass-encased models of three-bedroom homes landscaped with paper trees. He stared through the glass at Baobab Village.
"Too late," he said to himself, noting the sold-out sign.
But there were other offerings at the third annual home expo here, and he wandered over to Acacia Court, Simba Villas and Green Park, three of the many new developments along the Kenyan capital's edges.
"I was told all these are bought and everyone's moved in," Abeno said, looking down at the red roofs. "I've just come to see what's on offer so in the near future I can get one for myself."
Traipsing through the Nairobi Exhibition and Convention Center on this weekend were small-business owners, teachers, civil servants, farmers, recent college graduates and others, who make up a group of Kenyans often invisible to the outside world: neither desperately poor nor outlandishly rich but someplace in between.
On a continent where people are often trying to escape or simply survive, here were people perusing six-burner stoves who said they wished to stay, aspiring homeowners who have been fueling what amounts to a construction boom in this east African city of skyscrapers and rusted slums; leafy, moneyed neighborhoods; and lately, it seems, a thousand half-built cinder-block condominiums with pools, gyms and broadband Internet.
Although the Kenyan economy is growing at 6 percent a year, economists are uncertain whether the proliferation of new housing and accompanying mortgages reflects a growing middle class or simply a more prosperous one.
The dominant economic picture of the country, they say, is one of entrenched inequality, with the number of people slipping into poverty increasing and the gap between rich and poor widening.
But that statistical picture does not account for the sense of fragile optimism along the aisles at the convention center on a Sunday or, for that matter, around a city where billboards advertising mortgages promise "a new lifestyle" with images of a well-dressed man walking across a sun-splattered lawn.
"Looking at these houses, you see a whole life," said Nicholas Kinoti, a clothing designer with his own shop, which caters to a wealthy clientele. "I thought instead of paying rent, I could adjust and pay a mortgage."
He was among dozens swarming the booth for a new development of Kansas-made prefabricated houses called Green Park, whose managing director is a former aid worker who once dealt with the Ethiopian famine.
Kinoti counts himself among a relatively small but notable group of Kenyans who have climbed their way into a kind of life their parents barely imagined. His mother and father were subsistence farmers and managed to send their son to a university in Nairobi. He got a job with a travel agency afterward and, with help from brochures of Paris and heavy doses of television, developed a taste for fashion and an urban lifestyle.;
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/18/AR2007061801621.html
