Like many downtowns, Cape Town CBD felt deserted and vulnerable during the hardest lockdown, and while it is slowly feeling like a buoyancy (if not yet vibrancy) is returning, the question of how it will fully recover is hot in the corridors of city planners, commercial landlords, restauranteurs and people with a focus on services in public safety and social development alike.
Naturally, a key part of recovery is the re-opening of the economy. It’s a little like starting an old car after a storm at the moment — just as we get going, we stall, and then the old girl starts making a sound she didn’t quite used to before she jerks forward, only to stall again. When and how will we be jottling along again?
Of course, people make cities, and we need people to make recovery work. We need locals living in, working and visiting the central city, and we need tourists visiting Cape Town for leisure, culture and business. The view presented here is not so much about what will make people come back initially (that's about what phase of lock down we are in, what type of manager you have, or how brave a tourist you are), but rather what will sustain the cars ignition, instead of it jerking and stalling and potentially failing for good.
Here are my thoughts about what will drive recovery.
Infrastructure
Pre-covid, for at least the last decade, infrastructure has been a constraint to development of the inner-city. Waste water chief among them, and of course public transport and congestion, as well as various substation upgrades and issues with water pressure.
While developments have been approved and going ahead, some have had to innovate around these constraints at extra cost by, for example, including basement storage of waste water that gets released into the bulk system at night (off-peak for the commercial district), while residents and businesses in established areas complain of more frequent bursts and pressure issues.
The looming capacity limits of inner city infrastructure has been a throttle on development. By the time it runs out, which objectives for the inner city will have been met, and which ones not? Advocates for affordable housing and proponents of various versions of WCG and CCT plans for strategic sites (be it the old WCG regeneration programme, or the more recent CCT inner-city land release programme) have questioned whether sufficient bulk services capacity has been reserved for these ambitions, or if it will all have been used up by market developments by the time these initiatives ever break ground.
A clear programme of infrastructure investment to address these constraints, using a combination of CCT capital budgets as well as development contributions collected and projected to be collected through planned developments, will stimulate recovery and ensure that as the market returns, it is enabled and directed towards the inner-city in line with the City’s densification objectives.
Having said that, the days of infrastructure being centralised are over. More and more innovation in building and precinct-scale solutions are available.
Innovation in precinct-scale green infrastructure is already being led by the V&A Waterfront, and will be followed by developers in Woodstock, Maitland, Rugby and Sea Point if the City’s regulations and approvals processes can respond appropriately. The Waterfront is able to invest in precinct scale water re-use and energy services due to their guaranteed package of plans approvals. They can invest in technologies that will service a precinct of bulk, even if they’re not quite certain when and what that bulk will be turned into. Developers who have bought up multiple sites across regeneration areas seeking similar package approvals (rather than individual site approvals) have to date not been able to get the City to understand what they’re trying to do — being forced to treat risk on a site-by-site basis, removing any chance of investment in precinct-scale decentralized infrastructure solutions.
If the City wants to see the inner-city develop, it will need to not only start implementing its own infrastructure upgrades, but start meeting these developers half-way (or all the way) with these approaches and proposal.
(The bits the City has done well on here, and should continue to deliver on, is street infrastructure, with improvements to walkability of the CBD, such as the bulb-outs and changes to traffic signaling — an incomplete process, worthy of completion).
Social issues
Speak to anyone living in, working in, or trying to sell/rent property in the or around the CBD at the moment and you won’t get around the issue of homelessness.
My personal observation, having lived in and worked in the CBD for many years, is that the number of homeless has increased marginally, but the visibility of homelessness has increased sharply due to homeless people establishing more permanent living spaces (more tents and “hokkies”), and a significant shift in aggressive and anti-social behaviour.
Every major city in the world has a homeless population, and no city has succeeded in dealing with this through a law-enforcement driven approach. A “move along” approach simply serves to frustrate individuals, increasing aggressive behaviour.
Common to other cities, is the complexity of issues such as mental health needs, substance abuse issues, economic need, links to intergenerational and family domestic violence, etc. Particular to Cape Town, however, are the extreme levels of inequality and trauma in our society, and the extreme levels of economic need, gangsterism and gender based violence that contribute to vulnerability to end up on the streets. Our CBD development cannot happen without also paying attention to the social and economic welfare of the rest of the metro.
Within the inner city, if we are to tackle this issue successfully, significantly more resources will be needed than we have ever dedicated to this before. We need to put aside fears of “queue jumping” for other government programmes and recognise that the homeless population are a unique population that require what global best practice recognises as the only sustainable and most cost-effective pathway out — a “housing first” model that combines stable housing with programmatic support for the complex social & health needs of affected individuals.
Visible public safety officers that are appropriately trained to manage behaviour is a part of this solution — to protect the interests of all citizens to enjoy streets and public spaces, and de-escalate volatile situations.
Organised crime
This is not an area of my expertise, but the organised criminal activity in the CBD, such as drug dealing, human trafficking and protection rackets requires a coordinated and concerted response. This is beyond the remit of top-up public safety capabilities of improvement districts and business forums.
Cultural uses
Cape Town at its peak performance is Cape Town at its most culturally active. Switching on of the lights. Fringe Festival. Tweede Nuwe Jaar. Assembly. Infect the City. Madame Zingaras. Zip Zap Circus. Open Streets. Museum nights. First Thursdays. Adderley Street Christmas Market. [Insert your favourite].
Over the years, these moments have become harder to “manage”, and attempts to close them, shorten them, contain them have taken hold. We’ve gone from multiple live music venues to only a few very small ones. We’ve gone from an entire December calendar of events, to a few symbolic ones.
There are only so many R150 burgers Capetonians can buy on Bree Street, and only so many restaurants tourists are interested in before they start to ask “where are the locals?”.
Let’s bring culture back to the CBD.
This means a pro-active events policy from the City, it means support and resourcing to the additional night-time services the CCID must supply as though these are a normal part of a 24-hour city, and not an “event”, and it means commercial landlords taking a precinct-approach, including spaces that are activated as cultural (and inclusive) destinations that create the footfall that then feeds the rest (shoutout to the Waterfront for their investment in spaces such as the skatepark, the free concerts, etc as a family-rated model on this) and it means resourcing arts and culture organisations from across the metro, and giving them a stake in the inner-city through regular events, markets and active efforts to memorialise Cape Town’s diverse history on its streets and public spaces.
Residential
You didn’t think I’d let you read this far and not hit you with a reminder about the fact the Cape Town’s inner city’s residents were removed by force during apartheid, and we’ve never regained that ratio of residential to non-residential uses.
Apart from the very valid social justice reasons for housing programmes in the inner city, the lack of mixed-income, mixed-tenure residential supply in the inner city is a fundamental weakness of the economic model of the inner city.
Some people think a lack of policy and delivery over the past twenty years is suddenly going to be undone by COVID. “Market forces” got us here, and “market forces” will solve it.
I don’t think they’re that “lucky”.
Yes, some landlords are renegotiating rentals downward, but who is benefiting? Mostly, the same tenants who were renting here before. That's great for them, and they may have been impacted personally by COVID, but its not addressing a structural issue of access to affordable housing or access to the inner city.
Further, we are not going to get commercial landlords to convert their now somewhat vacant buildings to residential simply by asking them nicely and pointing out that now might be the time. Firstly, because there is still significant uncertainty about how the commercial market will recover — planning a conversion is a costly and lengthy endeavor, and landlords might be holding out for a threshold of anchor tenants to return within that time frame. Secondly, because vacancies aren’t perfectly distributed — we aren’t sitting with entire buildings ready to convert, and others fully occupied — commercial landlords with multiple buildings and the potential to negotiate to move tenants around, or develop mixed-use are arguably more likely candidates. And finally — and possibly most importantly, because converting a commercial building to residential is expensive. And there is currently a large amount of supply of residential apartments that are unsold or unlet.
During an economic downturn, returns become more modest, number of applications slow down, and the room to negotiate and impost inclusionary housing conditions becomes smaller.
If the public sector wants to use COVID impacts as some sort of panacea to its failure to deliver well-located affordable housing, the best way it can do this is to fast track development of its own land. Releasing its own land with strong targets for affordable components, including partnership arrangements with social housing institutions, will take advantage of the market downturn and secure a portion of the market for affordable housing while contributing to recovery in a direct way.
Where it does want to pursue inclusionary housing, it will need to offer significant incentives that will attract interest to residential development in and of itself — such as fast tracking development applications, offer increased bulk & reduced parking allowances, addressing infrastructure concerns (as above) and potentially including direct fiscal rebates.
