A place all their own

So that every family may own a home. This, according to the chair-director general of Lebanon’s Public Corporation for Housing (PCH), Rony Lahoud, is the overarching idea under which the understaffed government agency pursues its mission of examining an endless stream of loan applications from Lebanese citizens. “It is hard work, but it’s amazing at the same time because when we are giving a loan to the citizen, we are telling him, ‘yeah you are going to have your own apartment where you can build your family,’” he says. Lahoud’s career stops included work in banking and banking related IT companies outside of Lebanon before he joined PCH as ranking public servant and was confirmed as the agency’s chair and director general (CDG) on May 9, 2014, as part of a wave of high level administrative appointments that constituted one of the last governmental decisions before the end of President