But these mature homeowners are the youngest of the young in real estate terms, buyers who are 25 years and younger. While their friends live in cramped apartments and downtown lofts, small flocks of young adults across the country are forgoing places like Hell's Kitchen or the Castro district for subdivisions named Castlegate and Churchill Club. They are choosing the far-flung exurbs of America.

They give up nightclubs, art galleries and the frenetic urban thrum that serves as a soundtrack for so many people in their 20's. In return, these buyers get new homes, cheap land and the promise of being pioneers in communities rising from old wheat fields and sod farms.

Developers, quick to catch on, are starting to advertise on college campuses and in apartment complexes occupied by young renters.

"We were surprised by the number of 20-somethings out there who were buying," said Scott Smith, president of Great Western Homes near Phoenix, which is a unit of K. Hovnanian Homes. "We thought it was purely an affordability issue, but they said they wanted to be on the outer edges."

Younger buyers helped fuel the real estate boom that sent prices for houses soaring over the last four years. Wary of the stock market, they sprang at low interest rates and riskier financing methods like interest-only loans.

There are no statistics that break down exactly where the youngest buyers are purchasing homes, but census data show their strength. Homeowners younger than 25 still make up the smallest fraction of all owners, but their numbers are growing faster than any other age group, more than doubling since 1994.

The National Association of Realtors reported that 12 percent of first-time buyers are under 25. Though the under-25 buyer makes up only 1 percent of all homeowners nationally, several exurban developers said these young buyers represent 7 to 12 percent of their sales.

Buyers like Ashley Candelaria, 21, who owns a home on the mesas of New Mexico, now represent a new starting point in the housing market, one that developers say has upended the entrenched narrative of homeowner evolution.

For years, the story went like this: With their buying power crimped by college debt, entry-level salaries and meager savings accounts, many of the youngest buyers started small. They bought studio apartments, one-bedroom bungalows or modest town houses in desirable neighborhoods or commuter suburbs, sacrificing space for location. They traded up for more space as they had children, received promotions, bought second cars and accrued more and more stuff.

But now, "the 20-somethings don't have the same attitude," said Mr. Smith, the developer. "They're willing to do whatever they can to get it now. They're willing to take a leap."

Chad Horne, president of Windward Homes in Tampa, Fla., another branch of Hovnanian Homes, said an 1,800-square-foot house on a one-tenth-acre lot close to the city costs more than a 2,200-square-foot home on a quarter acre in far-flung Pasco County. Younger buyers often take the bigger, more distant house.

Ms. Candelaria was still in high school when she decided to buy a house, and saved everything from jobs at J. C. Penney and local hair salons. Once she graduated and got an administrative job at a center for mentally disabled adults, she began scouring the outer-ring suburbs of Albuquerque for a home.

After seven months of seeing homes that were either too shabby or too expensive, Ms. Candelaria said she stumbled onto a sales office for KB Home, a developer that was building a subdivision in the desert. For $119,000 - about half of the national median home price, $220,000 - Ms. Candelaria got a new three-bedroom house with a tile roof and a yard for her dog, Roxy, a German shepherd-Rottweiler mix.

A young family lives on one side of Ms. Candelaria; on the other, an elderly woman who marveled that Ms. Candelaria had become a homeowner at 20.

But the setting was spectacular. Bordered on its entire eastern side by Biscayne Bay and bisected by the Miami River, downtown Miami invited a transformation, and now that makeover is under way.

Cranes loom above the Biscayne Boulevard/Brickell Avenue corridor, which is greater downtown's Main Street, as developers build spaces where people will shop and play - and live.

Dana A. Nottingham, executive director of the Miami Downtown Development Authority, said 3,041 new condominium units were recently completed in the northern Omni district (recently rechristened the Media and Entertainment District), the southern Brickell financial district and the central business and Park West districts between them that is the heart of downtown. Another 13,890 condo units are under construction in the same areas, and plans have been filed for buildings that would provide 10,534 more.

Although many of the purchasers are speculators, others intend to use their places as second homes. With downtown still a construction zone, they are buying the future.

"We know it'll be years until the area gets where it's going," said Sharon Dodge, a Seattle businesswoman who bought a one-bedroom waterfront vacation condo in Omni with her partner, Loly Carrillo, a creative director, last March. "But it's exciting to be there instead of South Beach. Maybe it's just that downtown now is for a certain kind of person. I'd always rather be where things are going than be where things have been."

The Scene

New public spaces are helping to shape downtown. The Miami Performing Arts Center, a massive indoor/outdoor complex in the Omni area, is scheduled to open this fall. Just south, along Biscayne Bay, Bicentennial Park is being transformed into Museum Park, home of science and art museums.

Several blocks farther south, Bayfront, an underused 32-acre public park redesigned in the 1980's by Isamu Noguchi, will be redesigned again "to be more pedestrian friendly," Mayor Diaz said.

Between Museum and Bayfront Parks is American Airlines Arena, the 20,000-seat home of the Miami Heat basketball team, which has been holding concerts as well as sports events since opening in 2000. And there's plenty of retail space in the new projects, although few developers have announced the names of retailers who have signed on.

For now, going out at night means ranging beyond the heart of downtown. Several good restaurants have opened in the last three years in nearby Brickell, including Duo, a stylish spot with a French-influenced New American menu; Mosaico, which serves innovative New Spanish food in a former firehouse; and the casual River Oyster Bar. West of Biscayne Boulevard, Omni and the adjoining, rather optimistically named Park West area still look depressed but have a vibrant nightlife with music clubs including the Pawn Shop, a celebrity favorite, and PS 14, and several dance clubs: Space, Nocturnal and Metropolis, whose dance floor is 35,000 square feet.

Although Miami's hottest art and design scene is now concentrated north of Omni in Wynwood and the Design District, two art spaces opened downtown in 2005: the Cisneros Foundation's new exhibition space for Latin American art and the One Miami Riverwalk, a pedestrian path with art installations.

"I liked Sobe 15 years ago because it was like a multicultural village, where you could walk everywhere, and I think the scene will be like that here," Ms. Carrillo said, using the nickname for South Beach. "But in Sobe, it's all a young, dance-oriented crowd. Here I think it will be artsy in a more sophisticated way."

Alain Mahe, a New York investor who has owned a waterfront single-family second home on nearby Di Lido Island for nine years, originally saw the four condo units he bought a year ago, in MarinaBlue and adjacent 900 Biscayne Bay, purely as investments. "But now I am definitely considering moving to one of them in a few years, after they are completed," he said. "I like the idea of living in cutting-edge architecture, and the views of the bay will be unbeatable."

After last year's savage hurricane season, Mr. Mahe also said that living in a downtown condo could actually enhance his outdoor relaxation. "I like to boat," he said, "not to fix my dock."

Pros

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Last week, Mr. Khaddam caused an international furor when he told the satellite network Al Arabiya that Mr. Assad and other Syrian officials had threatened Mr. Hariri in the months before his death in a Beirut truck bombing in February 2005. In doing so, Mr. Khaddam became the most senior member of the Syrian inner circle to break ranks publicly.

On Thursday, in an interview in his home on a heavily secured private street in Paris, Mr. Khaddam repeated his allegation that Mr. Assad had personally threatened Mr. Hariri. Although he again stopped short of directly implicating Mr. Assad in the assassination, Mr. Khaddam gave more details of Mr. Assad's interaction with Mr. Hariri, and he harshly criticized Mr. Assad's increasingly aggressive governing style.

"I witnessed many incidents that raised questions in my mind," Mr. Khaddam said. "I realized that while this was going to be bad for Lebanon, it was going to be really bad for Syria."

Tensions between Mr. Hariri and Mr. Assad had reached a fever pitch by the summer of 2004, Mr. Khaddam said, and Mr. Assad appeared to be making increasingly erratic decisions as he became wary of Mr. Hariri's growing political power. Mr. Assad, for example, insisted on forcing through a term extension for the pro-Syrian Lebanese president, Emile Lahoud, against Mr. Khaddam's advice, fearing that a new president, probably backed by Mr. Hariri, would "open the files and show all the corruption that had been going on in Lebanon," Mr. Khaddam said.

He recounted in detail several incidents also cited by United Nations investigators that illustrated the degree of enmity between Mr. Hariri and Mr. Assad. One morning in 2004, Mr. Assad summoned Mr. Khaddam to his office to tell him that he had met with Mr. Hariri.

Mr. Khaddam said the president appeared tense and agitated as he recounted what he had said. " 'You are working against us!' " Mr. Assad said he had told Mr. Hariri. " 'You want to be the boss, but I decide things. And whoever resists will be taken out!' " Mr. Khaddam said Mr. Assad then asked him to try to smooth things over with Mr. Hariri. But within days, Mr. Khaddam said, the president resumed his aggressive tone with the former Lebanese prime minister, accusing him of working for foreign powers.

"You could see that there was this disgust toward Hariri, and he was fearing his growing power in Lebanon and its implications for Lahoud," Mr. Khaddam said.

Mr. Assad has denied any involvement in the assassination, and his government has moved aggressively against Mr. Khaddam in response to his comments. On Thursday, Syria's Finance Ministry froze the assets of Mr. Khaddam and his family. Earlier in the week, Syria's governing Baath Party stripped Mr. Khaddam of membership and hailed a unanimous vote in Parliament calling on the government to try him on treason and corruption charges.

Mr. Khaddam, 73, said he was stepping forward because he sought to serve his country and to stem what he called the corruption and stagnation under Mr. Assad's rule.

Mr. Khaddam became vice president in 1984 under Mr. Assad's father, Hafez al-Assad, and was widely regarded as the architect of Syria's policy of political and military domination in Lebanon.

He said he had pondered resigning as far back as 2003, three years after Bashar al-Assad rose to power, but finally stepped down in June 2005, after his attempts at reform were rebuffed, he said.

"Things are dangerous now, but the biggest danger is that the regime cannot make a smart decision anymore," he said. And he added another personal criticism of Mr. Assad: "The size of the responsibility he faces is bigger than him. And the people around him only serve to pump his ego and lie to him."

Syrian officials and former colleagues say Mr. Khaddam's influence on Syrian affairs may be exaggerated, and his public pronouncement was an expression of weakness more than strength.

"Khaddam has no power and no followers either inside or outside the Baath Party," Muhammad Salman, a former information minister and confidant of Mr. Khaddam's, said in an interview on Thursday. He said the former vice president committed political suicide by going public.

Mr. Khaddam said the organized spectacle in Syria only supported his position that Mr. Assad tightly controls the government's institutions.

Lina Sinjab contributed reporting from Damascus for this article.

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