Fifteen years ago Saigon South was all marshland and paddy fields, worked by peasant farmers. But years of runaway growth have led to a remarkable transformation.
The area is now a fashionable district, resembling a neat US suburb, in Ho Chi Minh City, southern Vietnam's business capital, once called Saigon.
Alongside tree-lined avenues are the latest designs in apartment blocks, boutiques and luxury villas, albeit some built to garish tastes. Shopping complexes and a high technology park are leaving the drawing boards.
Saigon South is a fashionable area, said Kim, a 40-year-old businesswoman who declined to give her family name.
"For expatriates, especially South Koreans [who are present in large numbers in Vietnam], and for local yuppies and the young-at-heart, who have stable and good incomes," she said.
Kim gave up her house close to the airport in March and bought another featuring three rooms and a small garden in Saigon South.
"It's close to the city center and the prices are reasonable. It's a quiet neighborhood and a security guard keeps watch," she said.
Her husband found the essential requisites for well-heeled residents -- tennis courts and a golf course.
Promoted by Taiwanese developer Central Trading and Development Group (中央貿易開發), Saigon South covers 3,100 hectares and stands in contrast to the chaotic development elsewhere in Ho Chi Minh City.
The city's population has swollen from 500,000 in the 1940s to 3.5 million in 1975 -- when the Vietnam War ended -- and to the current seven million. But the growth has been supported by no planned development.
Between 1994 and 1997, it fattened further and witnessed an influx of foreign investors enamored by the prospect of another emerging Asian Tiger as the Communist government moved from a central planned to a more market oriented economy.
The city's property market bore an El Dorado air.
"But with the Asian financial crisis, the city experienced a recession between 1997 and 2000," said Mark Townsend, CB Richard Ellis Vietnam's managing director.
And like other major cities in Asia, Townsend said Ho Chi Minh was lined with unfinished buildings.
The crisis passed and by 2000 another round of growth began.
In the city center, luxury buildings are mushrooming at US$20 a square meter, much higher than in Bangkok.
"Residential districts have come up to the northwest and southwest of the city," said Pierre-Jean Malgouyres, deputy general manager of Archetype, a firm of architects and engineers.
"It's an often anarchic urbanization," he said, warning of serious problems for water treatment and waste disposal.
Ho Chi Minh City's planning and investment department acknowledges the problem, declaring recently on its Web site that the city "suffers from a worrying environmental deterioration."
Ho Chi Minh City is congested and polluted to near choking point but the authorities have not abandoned their ambition of making it a major city in the region.
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