Asians move to new towns, far from the madding crowds

EASTWOOD CITY, PHILIPPINES, Apr 25 (Reuters) For a glimpse of how millions of middle class Asians could live in future, take a look at Eastwood City, a self-contained office and apartment complex on the outskirts of Manila.

Its 9,000 inhabitants live in 40-storey blocks, measure their commute in minutes, not hours, and never have to worry about power cuts or water stoppages. And at 175,000 dollars for a 100 sq metre home, they pay 10 per cent less than they would in central Manila.

The shops are open until midnight and restaurants operate 24 hours, catering to shift-workers in the Eastwood offices of international firms such as Dell and IBM.

The 16-hectare estate, eight kilometres from downtown Manila, is one of dozens of new towns that developers are building across Asia to lure an emerging middle class out of the region's overcrowded cities.

With homes, offices, schools and shops within walking distance of each other, these towns are attracting young couples and nuclear families keen to escape the traffic jams, crowded tenements, and creaking infrastructure of the big cities.

''What buyers want is easy access, schools, medical facilities,'' said Ang Wee Gee, an executive at Singapore's Keppel Land , one of the developers cashing in on this trend.

''Whether it's Indians in Bangalore or the Chinese in Chengdu, they want the same things.'' Keppel Land, Southeast Asia's third-largest property firm, has about 40 percent of its overseas investments in what it calls ''townships'' or ''gated communities'' such as Saigon Sports City, a 65-hectare estate in Vietnam where a third of the land is set aside for sports facilities such as stadiums and swimming pools.

''Gated communities create a sense of exclusivity, of being a class above the rest,'' Ang said, adding that Keppel Land's townships attract a range of middle-income buyers including young professionals and retirees.

OUTSOURCING BOOM It's not just aspirations driving the demand. Thanks to the outsourcing boom in India and the Philippines, these townships are proliferating in cheap, out-of-town locations.

Housing projects by top Philippines property firms such as Ayala Land and Megaworld Corp. are custom-built for residents who work in round-the-clock call centres.

Megaworld's Eastwood City has its own back-up generators so that tenants such as Citibank aren't hit by Manila's notoriously frequent power outages.

The developer is spending $1.3 billion in the next decade to put up towns clustered around call centres.

Its largest such project, the 50-hectare McKinley Hill estate, will have homes to suit the varying incomes of those who will live and work there, ranging from studios to three-storey villas.

Just 20 km east of Malaysia's capital Kuala Lumpur, Sunway City has begun work on its 50-hectare South Quay residential estate which will include a university campus, a hospital and an office complex.

The firm hopes that students, medical staff and even foreign retirees will buy into the project, which is built around an artificial lake on former tin-mining land.

For developers, townships can give double the investment returns of individual city-centre apartment blocks, commanding a premium because of all the extra amenities provided.

In India, developers are targeting internal rates of return of as much as 30-40 percent and dozens of firms are queuing up to launch public share sales to fund new projects. These include a $2 billion offering from DLF Ltd., a major builder in Gurgaon, a new town of about 200,000 people on New Delhi's outskirts.

THE BANGKOK OF THE FUTURE Gurgaon, with its bright white tower blocks, is thriving as one of India's main technology industry outsourcing hubs. But local newspapers report that the city is growing so fast that residents are starting to complain about problems they thought they had left behind -- blackouts and water shortages.

It's not the only township with problems. Perhaps the most famous failure was Bangkok Land's Muang Thong Thani complex, originally advertised as ''the Bangkok of the Future'', near the Thai capital's old international airport.

The $1 billion project recorded rapid sales in the early 1990s but remained a ghost town, as most buyers were speculators swept up in a property bubble while the economy was booming.

The teachers and other civil servants who were expected to live in the rows of 30-storey condominium blocks stayed away because the town was too far away from their workplaces.

By the time the Asian economic crisis hit in 1997, some 12,000 units were left unsold, and an attempt to persuade the government to move offices to the new town failed.

Architect Benjamin Wood, who turned a cluster of shabby houses in Shanghai into the trendy Xintiandi bar and restaurant district, said new towns only succeed if they get the right balance of homes, work and leisure.

''You need to mix it up, have million-dollar homes next to middle-income homes, and shop houses and offices,'' Wood said.

''An individual needs a bit of chaos.'' REUTERS KR RAI1147