One of Africa’s unluckiest cities is bouncing back

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Goma, a city in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, is what you might call a star-crossed place. It has endured decades of bloody civil war, played host to thousands of fugitive murderers who masterminded the genocide in neighboring Rwanda, and in 2002, a hot wall of lava from an erupting volcano flattened the downtown. 

But now mansions are going up. The Chicago Tribune‘s intrepid foreign correspondent, Paul Salopek (who was detained for more than a month last year in Darfur for his reporting) just filed a fascinating piece about the city’s recent transformation from hell on Earth to real estate boomtown. Where survival crops were once planted in traffic circles, he writes, tropical flowers now bloom. Land plots are going for $30,000 not far from the lake where bones of Rwandan genocide victims still wash ashore.

It seems that the town’s near-destruction a few years ago by a nearby volcano has given it the chance to reinvent itself—or at least for the real-estate speculators to move in and recreate a city center at extortion prices. And yet the “startling rebirth of the town-that-just-won’t-die,” as Salopek calls it, is still just one eruption away from more ruin.

And then there’s the rest of the neighborhood: The surrounding countryside is still rife with rebels battling with government forces, and an estimated 800,000 refugees have been displaced recently due to the fighting. Not the most stable real estate environment for investment, perhaps, but admirable all the same that people can shake it all off and rebuild.