Changing Lifestyles : Some Squatters in Rags Get Riches From Effort to Rebuild Beirut Area : But others are overlooked by a program that pays thousands to families displaced by construction.

It’s like biblical wisdom: a time to knock down and a time to build up, and in downtown Beirut several hundred families are trapped between these injunctions.

Some of the families have lived in this historic port city for more than half a century--during the golden years, through the terrors of war and now in the promise of peace.

In Lebanon, peace can mean financial opportunity. It has for these families, because their homes or lands lie in the path of progress. And they won’t leave for nothing.

A year ago SOLIDERE, the Lebanese Company for Development and Reconstruction of Beirut Central District, began leveling 400 acres in the center of the Lebanese capital to make room for major infrastructural work on the redevelopment site.

Residents whose homes were scheduled for demolition (many but not all homes were leveled in the 15 years of Lebanon’s civil war) would be paid to leave. So what had been a tiny community of downtown residents swelled as SOLIDERE began work on the $1.8-billion project. Hezbollah, the militant Islamic group, drove in pickups full of Shiite families, telling them to settle in quickly.

The news of future payoffs spread, and other families came on their own. Some were genuine refugees from the south; many were simply squatters. But the result was greed-driven growth. A 1991 SOLIDERE survey of the downtown population listed 2,500 illegal residents. In a 1993 count, the number soared to 4,500.

Even within the category of illegal residents, the SOLIDERE payoff scale is $8,000 per family for those forced to move, unless they are from Israeli-occupied south Lebanon. Considered hardship cases, the southern families receive $4,000 more.

And this is just base pay. Both Hezbollah and its rival, the Shiite Amal movement, act as what the Lebanese call simsaar in Arabic--broker. The simsaar will argue your case, even tinker with the numbers a bit and get you a better deal. And, of course, take his cut.

One popular scam involves borrowing the registration papers of your relatives. This important document is accepted as proof of your residence. So with one or two, even three, borrowed registration cards, some families have received up to $48,000 in evacuation fees.

Individual ruses also run rampant. Downtown residents tell of a man named Ahmed who divorced his wife so that the ex-couple could argue that they were two families and double their payoff.

Although SOLIDERE insists that no family qualifying for compensation has been turned out without it, Zeinab Majed argues the opposite. She and other members of her family were illegal residents of an abandoned downtown building for four years. She thinks they were overlooked on the registries of qualified residents because the other families in the building were Syrian and not eligible for compensation.

Majed, 21, cares for her brother’s four sons and her daughter from a failed marriage. The boys’ father just began a seven-year jail sentence for stabbing a police officer. The mother disappeared one night five years ago and is presumed dead.

Majed and the children, who range in age from 2 to 13, live under an overpass in a hovel made of old doors and pressed wood stripped from a building before it was destroyed. Nylon sheeting over the top gives the hovel a tent-like look.

The oldest boy and only breadwinner, Mahmoud, earns about $15 a week as an apprentice auto mechanic. The other boys play in the streets. But any suggestion that the family return to its village of Kfar Selm in south Lebanon draws a look of horror from Majed. Israel considers Kfar Selm a Hezbollah base, and she is convinced that a hovel in Beirut is a better bet.

Besides, perhaps her case for evacuation money may work out. SOLIDERE has agreed to look into it.

An appraisal committee was set up to determine fair compensation for legal renters. The original plan of giving them shares in SOLIDERE was supplemented by an additional sum, based on apartment size.

Legal renter Gaby Mardinian, who has lived in his Minet el Hosn apartment since 1969, is typical. The neighborhood was once the Beirut equivalent of New Orleans’ French Quarter in terms of charm and good restaurants.

In 1976, however, the nearby hotel district became a major battleground where Christian militiamen fought Muslim and Palestinian forces from gun positions in lobbies, bridal suites and rooftops of the 23-story Holiday Inn and the Phoenicia hotel.

That episode changed Minet el Hosn forever. Now, Mardinian and three other renters are all that’s left of the original neighbors, and his experiences typify life with SOLIDERE.

Married with four young children, Mardinian calls the memories of the 15 years of war hard. But life last month got even harder. The gas station next door was bulldozed by SOLIDERE. Then the organization bulldozed the wall separating Mardinian’s four-story building from the demolished station.

The noise and proximity of the machinery sent his 71-year-old mother into hysterics; the children screamed; his wife didn’t know whom to comfort first.

Mardinian ran out of the building and found a German engineer on the scene. When the SOLIDERE worker realized that people were still living in the building, he ordered the work stopped and explained that he thought the structure was empty.

His assumption was understandable. The other three floors of the building had been inhabited by squatters who had been paid off and left.

When a building is judged to be empty, it is dynamited. So far there have been no injuries. Neighbors are warned to leave their buildings just in case. Each explosion brings out mothers, babies, the elderly--everyone. In Mardinian’s neighborhood, they gather on the grounds of a makeshift soccer field--in prewar years a Christian cemetery.

Once SOLIDERE pays Mardinian off, he will have a total in combined compensation and SOLIDERE shares of $130,000. If that sounds like a good sum of money, keep in mind that to buy an apartment with the same floor space and convenient location in Beirut today would take nearly the entire amount. Rental units are so scarce that few even bother to look.

Beirut’s French Quarter today is the scene of illegal squatters laughing and joking as they pack up to leave after a good payoff. Mardinian watches as they depart. There is a time to get and a time to lose.