Recently Time Out voted Cape Town the best city in the world. This was for the tourist and business visitor experience, though, not the reality of residents.
Coincidentally, Kevin Bloom wrote an article in Daily Maverick titled "Sea Point's broken promises" about development and gentrification in the high-end suburb that's crowding out residents. He followed this with an interview with "combative" Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis who'd objected to the negative characterisation of the city regarding its development agenda.
The concern about development in Cape Town crowding out locals is not new. Just last week I saw a comment to a YouTube podcast by a British traveller about Cape Town being the "best city in the world" following the Time Out nomination. In the comments a local complained development is making the city crowded and expensive and it sucks.
Best for whom, I ask? In Bloom's interview Hill-Lewis compared Cape Town to Barcelona as tourist destination. But really there is no comparison - Barcelona is an ancient European city with so much history and culture and beauty a short or shortish flight from similar destinations and convenient for travellers. Barcelona residents, like those in other tourism hotspots, are resisting being overrun by tourists, never mind that the tourist stampede making their hometowns expensive for locals.
But this is what Hill-Lewis and DA want for Cape Town.
The DA suffer from the familiar problem of overreach - too confident in their own abilities, an attitude that helped create the conditions for the city having been unprepared for 2017's water crisis despite two year's warning.
One problem about development - the "red-carpet approach" developed under Patricia de Lille when mayor - was the transfer of planning decisions from built environment professionals to politicians. The Municipal Planning Tribunal is a political tool. It accepts developers' bullshit promises regarding purported "benefits" from development at face value and over verified testimony from objectors, the community. The mayor and premier if necessary rubberstamp MPT's decisions (See here https://thomascape.blogspot.com/2021/09/das-road-to-corruption-cape-towns.html)
Another problem is the city - read "DA" - are reported to be too close to developers, if you know what I mean.
Bloom writes Rawson's Sea Point Magnolia - a multi-purpose development where a 25m2 flat costs almost R2 million - development levy of R1.9 million is inadequate given its cost and scale and burden it will place on the water and sanitation infrastructure. Bloom says it's in hindsight that the outcome will be measured. I disagree.
In 2007 the city's then director of sanitation - I forget his name - told me in an interview taken for a master's project in urban studies that the levies developers pay are way too little. And that the city's sanitation network is under strain. The latter is not in dispute - evidence is the volume of raw sewage pumped into the ocean including Atlantic Seaboard which decades latter the city still doesn't have a solution for despite its promises - and on aging treatment plants.
Hill-Lewis was combative for a reason. He and DA are defensive about slowly strangling Cape Town's only real asset - its natural attractions - for, in the scheme of time, relatively short financial gains, gains that benefit its revenue stream (making it look good for annual audits) and absent, often foreign landlords.
What makes Cape Town what it is - the people and physical environment - is secondary to that calculus.
What pisses me off about them is their hubris: they claim credit for Cape Town being what it is (that it runs well is not so much due to them - give them credit too - but the residents and workers mainly). Hill-Lewis' boast about being "pro-poor" is nonsense too; they're simply doing what they legally must as a municipality by providing infrastructure to everyone who lives here. (See https://thomascape.blogspot.com/2023/05/cape-towns-budget-for-poor-response-to.html)
But visit a poor or even lower middle class area and ask if the city is pro-poor or the "best" in the world and I doubt they'd agree.
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