House No. 181 on 15th Street, while spacious, is definitely a fixer-upper. The kitchen cabinets, built with cheap plywood, are cracked. The linoleum floors in the halls are buckling. Wires hang like nooses from bedroom ceilings.
The last tenant paid $500 a month for the place, an amount that now seems decidedly paltry in this city of galloping rents. The current cost is $10,000. Location, location, location: the usual rules of real estate apply. But who would have thought Kabul, a bombed-out cadaver of a city, was as well situated as Manhattan?
Six months ago, with the Taliban still in power, landlords were more apt to think they were sitting on a sinkhole than a gold mine. Afghanistan had been through 22 consecutive years of war, leaving about 40 percent of Kabul looking post-apocalyptic.
"In a matter of months, the market has gone wild," said Azizullah, one of the city's best-known property dealers and these days a man of uncommonly good cheer. "A $70,000 house is now worth $1 million, and even for $1 million, most owners wouldn't sell."
The value lies in Kabul's very woe. Afghanistan is being placed on the comeback trail. Foreigners -- aid groups, businessmen, the media, the United Nations -- are setting up shop or expanding operations. Refugees, some well fattened in the West, are returning.
Demand easily surpasses supply, particularly in Kabul's two elite neighborhoods, Wazir Akbar Khan and Shahr-i-Naw. Foreigners vie for houses with the comforts of home, wanting electricity in relatively steady supply, preferring toilets that allow one to sit rather than squat.
Many tenants are willing to pay a landlord six months rent in advance, some a full year. Some have no scruples about signing two leases, one for the actual price and the other for a bogus pittance, a document the owner can then use when the time comes to pay taxes.
"I had no idea this house would ever be worth $3,000 or $4,000 a month," a self-satisfied man named Wahidullah said the other day. He had just moved back to Kabul from Pakistan. Carpenters and electricians, working for $8 a day, were readying his family's property. "Maybe I will never have to work again. Maybe I will have it made for life."
Unfortunately, there are but a few winners in Kabul's real estate bonanza and a great many losers. Those who can afford the higher rents are displacing those who cannot, who in turn push out those even lower on the economic ladder. Evictions have become epidemic.
In the poorer neighborhoods, where sewers run in an open ditch and houses have mud floors, people are stunned by the upheaval of escalating prices.
Kabul has an estimated population of two million, including 200,000 refugees who have come in just the past few months, seemingly limitless rivals for extremely limited shelter.
On Saturday, a distraught woman named Farishta visited a property agent in Khair Khana, a low-income neighborhood. For years, her rent had been about $12.50 a month. Suddenly, her landlord has demanded $95. She must find another place.
"I am a teacher and my husband is an engineer," she said, her voice a quivering plea emerging from beneath the camouflage of a burka. "There are no houses that even literate people can afford. What are the very poorest going to do?"
Shah Bacha, a proud man wearing the threadbare clothes of a day laborer, is among the poorest. His family lives in one of the squalid hovels of Khwoja Bhugra, paying about $6.25 for rent. Last week, the owner of the house said the rent was rising to $90, an impossible sum for Mr. Bacha. "I will have to take my children and sleep in the streets," he said.
On Sunday, an organization of charities working in Kabul -- the Agency Coordinating Body for Afghan Relief -- issued a plea for rent controls and an easing of restrictions on new construction. Part of the blame for inflated rents was placed on some of the international do-gooders in their midst: the World Bank, the United Nations, prosperous aid groups.
A fair bit of sniping is going on between those agencies paying the higher rents and others who are holding to a stricter budget. Medair, a charity best known here for fighting tuberculosis, was spending $500 a month for its headquarters in Shahr-i-Naw.
"The landlord told us his family was moving back here, and according to the lease, we had to go," said Claire Rowe, the organization's finance and administration manager. "Of course, they just wanted us out so they could move in someone else for more money."
That someone turns out to be the financially strapped World Food Program of the United Nations, which is now paying $8,000 a month to use the building as residential space. "It's an unfortunate situation, and everyone has had to face it," said Jennifer Abrahamson, a spokeswoman for the agency.
Prices are quoted here with little evident shame, the way they would be in Hong Kong or London or the Hamptons. Subtle pressure is applied to customers, who are told that once the billions of dollars in Western aid begin arriving, 20,000 more foreigners may descend on Kabul, heightening the competition.
As Azizullah, the well-known real estate man, mentioned this, he sent his eyebrows skyward, denoting the direction that rents would go. He continued a tour of available homes. At House 181 on 15th Street, in Wazir Akbar Khan, one of the owner's employees helped show off the $10,000-a-month space.
To be candid, the place did not look so great. There were paint stains on the floors. "If you want, we will carpet this with some kind of carpet," the man said offhandedly.
There was a yardlong gap between one section of the house and the other, with a two-foot drop in between. "If you want, some kind of bridge can be made," the man said.
There were bathtubs and wash basins with the enamel chipped away. "If you want, this too can be fixed," said the man, who by then had begun to grow impatient, wondering what a foreigner expected for $10,000 a month.
GRAPHIC: Photos: Shah Bacha, a day laborer in Kabul, has been told that the rent for the hovel he inhabits is going up from $6.25 a month to $90, an impossible sum for him. "I will have to take my children and sleep in the streets," he said.; The real-estate market in Afghanistan's capital has, in the words of one property dealer, "gone wild." This fixer-upper is for rent at $10,000 a month. (Photographs by Steve Connors for The New York Times)
Map of Kabul highlights Wazir Akbar Khan: Wazir Akbar Khan, an elite neighborhood, is favored by foreigners. -- Yoshie
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