It's the Saturday Open Thread. This weeks topic to riff on: "Sunset Beach - Worse architecture or worst architecture?"
15 comments:
Anonymous
said...
The house listed at http://capetownbubble.blogspot.com/2010/04/ugliest-house-ever-built-in-cape-town.html was going for 14.5m in early April, it is now at 11.9m ... tough times.
Do yourself a favour and drive to Protea Av in Fresnaye.
Someone with bags of money, no style and an ego from here to Johannesburg and back built a monster that is difficult to describe.
But one thing is sure: the only reason this house has been built is to insult and to vomit on your new shoes.
I am sure the owner does not give a hoot about his surroundings, can't be, this bunker has been designed by someone who is extremely angry.
And the responsible person at the Cape Town municipality who approved this heap of shit must have skipped the country silently and is living a life of leisure in Mauritius now.
Do yourself a favour and drive to Protea Av in Fresnaye.
Someone with bags of money, no style and an ego from here to Johannesburg and back built a monster that is difficult to describe.
But one thing is sure: the only reason this house has been built is to insult and to vomit on your new shoes.
I am sure the owner does not give a hoot about his surroundings, can't be, this bunker has been designed by someone who is extremely angry.
And the responsible person at the Cape Town municipality who approved this heap of shit must have skipped the country silently and is living a life of leisure in Mauritius now.
all you need to know as a newbie is there are 3 phases in a bull market, any bull market.
1 - smart money enters 2 - commercial money enters 3 - everyone else enters, smart money exits in this final mania phase
Phase 3 has been and gone. When everyone tells you not to buy property as its a bad investment feel certain that its time to buy as you will achieve your best entry point. wait for the headline "property is dead" in the sunday times.
4 scenarios for SA property a la Clem Sunter, defined by two axes - SA political stability (PS); SA financial system stability (FS). 1) High PS/High FS = Strong rand, liquidity returns, SA global property rerating continues, national property recovers an grows. 2) High PS/Low FS = strong rand; no liquidity; doldrums continue with risk of property under-performing for several years. 3) Low PS/High FS = Western Cape is golden; rand weakens; liquidity returns; semi-gration drives up W Cape Property, especially in retirement home sector. 4) Low PS; Low FS - Almost everyone loses except retirement property in W Cape; rand weakens, no liquidity; unemployment rises; high security retirement property is king.
Which is most likely? 3 or 4? In any even, W Cape retirement property in high security developments seems one of the few safer bets. For the younger of us, rent for now and save like mad into blue chips, OZ dollars, Gov bonds, some gold, maybe? You may be looking at buying overseas :)
Love that Clem Sunter. Except that if you believe his scenarios SA is definately on the "low road" to third world basket case status. The critical missing factor is the poor masses "get it" and stop moping around begging for crusts of bread or taxi fare and instead focus all their energy on becoming MBAs and web designers. Fat chance. There always was a tinge of neo-liberal evangelism about his common sense solutions, but he did endorse Margaret Legum and New Economics, the antithesis of neo liberalism (try www.sane.org) He hasn't been far wrong so far.
the monster house is owned by Richard Goldstein, who recently had to let his development of a trio of houses in Bantry Bay go for the song of 21m for the 3 of them.
Clearly though there is money to burn there (if no taste).
Clem Sunter says the country is going to pot, where's my passport?
Sunter does not make predictions, he rather sets up a useful way to think about the future (see Games Foxes Play). This generally involves choosing two major axes (ie political stability & financial stability) and looking at the 4 scenario combinations that result. The method focuses the mind on what is important. At the moment, the "Golden Western Cape" seems to be a very important emerging trend property-wise.
My blood runs cold when I read that the Western Cape is "golden". Read between the lines and you see a future emerging that I want no part of. My "golden" scenario is as follows:
1. The Reverse Great Trek begins: increasing numbers of gatvol white people move to the Cape "for the lifestyle" (translate as "to get away from The Crahm and The Blex"). Property prices in the Cape go through the roof. Nobody under 35 can afford to own even a shoebox.
2. The Trekkers bring with them extreme racial prejudice (old-time Northern Transvaal cracker attitudes spiced up with recent trauma - they feel that they have been chased from their homes, enough to racialise and radicalise even the most liberal among them)
3. They also bring with them their aesthetics: the southern suburbs start looking like the northern suburbs, and the northern suburbs start looking like Fourways.
4. With Cape Town and the Winelands effectively turned into a reactionary facebrick volkstaat, national government goes out of its way to sabotage the province. The constitution is changed to merge the Western and Eastern Cape, and a final wave of mass migration from the EC is carried out specifically to screw over whites: the creation of Hout Bay-style townships happens in Stellenbosch, Franschoek, Durbanville, Constantia - anywhere that will really get under the skins of the crusty landed gentry.
5. With their province highly racialised, tense, angry, and ludicrously expensive, liberal Capeys and most under-35s leave the country in search of greener pastures. You can still make a killing, you can still have the fantasy life with the palm trees and pool behind the razor wire, but why would you want that in a fractured country: a banana republic in the north, a last outpost of capitalist white rage in the south.
Ya - the above scenario is called "Fortress Constantia" in Clem's book "Games Foxes Play" which describes scenario planning done by Cape Town City officials. They key thing that distinguishes this from a golden scenario is the extent to which the province spreads the wealth effect created by a growing concentration of well educated and high earning potential individuals, and how we all cooperate with those efforts. Are we really heading for a "new Orania", "fortress Constantia" or is there enough intelligence around to know that more effective wealth sharing is essential to maintain one of the best lifestyles the world has to offer? It will be interesting to see how DA/ID alignment nudges this towards a better outcome.
"It will be interesting to see how DA/ID alignment nudges this towards a better outcome."
Is there a single policy advocated by these parties that could be interpreted as a desire to secure this outcome? DA has allocated less than 1% of the WCape budget to informal settlements. The province will be paying off the cost of larnie Seapoint's stadium, bus stops and gardens for the next decade or more. DA knows what side it's bread is buttered on.
The DA had no choice about the location of the new stadium. In fact if I remember correctly Zille (at the time mayor of CT) wanted the stadium on the Flats or to upgrade Newlands (which would have cost a tenth of the cost of the new stadium).
FIFA said no thank you and got the national govt to put the kibosh on those ideas.
you guys should get out to Khayelitsha some time. roads are being up graded along with pavements and planting trees etc. Definitely some kind of civic improvement that was begun while Helen was mayor. The cynical amongst us might say that the da has decided to target black middle class before worrying about those unfortunates stuck in squatter camps. But I was quite impressed with what i saw.
15 comments:
The house listed at http://capetownbubble.blogspot.com/2010/04/ugliest-house-ever-built-in-cape-town.html was going for 14.5m in early April, it is now at 11.9m ... tough times.
Do yourself a favour and drive to Protea Av in Fresnaye.
Someone with bags of money, no style and an ego from here to Johannesburg and back built a monster that is difficult to describe.
But one thing is sure: the only reason this house has been built is to insult and to vomit on your new shoes.
I am sure the owner does not give a hoot about his surroundings, can't be, this bunker has been designed by someone who is extremely angry.
And the responsible person at the Cape Town municipality who approved this heap of shit must have skipped the country silently and is living a life of leisure in Mauritius now.
Do yourself a favour and drive to Protea Av in Fresnaye.
Someone with bags of money, no style and an ego from here to Johannesburg and back built a monster that is difficult to describe.
But one thing is sure: the only reason this house has been built is to insult and to vomit on your new shoes.
I am sure the owner does not give a hoot about his surroundings, can't be, this bunker has been designed by someone who is extremely angry.
And the responsible person at the Cape Town municipality who approved this heap of shit must have skipped the country silently and is living a life of leisure in Mauritius now.
as a property newbie, i wish this blog would offer a little bit more insight... just a tiny little bit more... given there's hardly any right now.
Anon,
all you need to know as a newbie is there are 3 phases in a bull market, any bull market.
1 - smart money enters
2 - commercial money enters
3 - everyone else enters, smart money exits in this final mania phase
Phase 3 has been and gone. When everyone tells you not to buy property as its a bad investment feel certain that its time to buy as you will achieve your best entry point. wait for the headline "property is dead" in the sunday times.
4 scenarios for SA property a la Clem Sunter, defined by two axes - SA political stability (PS); SA financial system stability (FS). 1) High PS/High FS = Strong rand, liquidity returns, SA global property rerating continues, national property recovers an grows. 2) High PS/Low FS = strong rand; no liquidity; doldrums continue with risk of property under-performing for several years. 3) Low PS/High FS = Western Cape is golden; rand weakens; liquidity returns; semi-gration drives up W Cape Property, especially in retirement home sector. 4) Low PS; Low FS - Almost everyone loses except retirement property in W Cape; rand weakens, no liquidity; unemployment rises; high security retirement property is king.
Which is most likely? 3 or 4? In any even, W Cape retirement property in high security developments seems one of the few safer bets. For the younger of us, rent for now and save like mad into blue chips, OZ dollars, Gov bonds, some gold, maybe? You may be looking at buying overseas :)
Love that Clem Sunter. Except that if you believe his scenarios SA is definately on the "low road" to third world basket case status. The critical missing factor is the poor masses "get it" and stop moping around begging for crusts of bread or taxi fare and instead focus all their energy on becoming MBAs and web designers. Fat chance.
There always was a tinge of neo-liberal evangelism about his common sense solutions, but he did endorse Margaret Legum and New Economics, the antithesis of neo liberalism (try www.sane.org) He hasn't been far wrong so far.
the monster house is owned by Richard Goldstein, who recently had to let his development of a trio of houses in Bantry Bay go for the song of 21m for the 3 of them.
Clearly though there is money to burn there (if no taste).
Clem Sunter says the country is going to pot, where's my passport?
Clem never actually said it to my knowledge. I'm just plotting where we are on his "high road" - "low road" scenario diagrams.
Sunter does not make predictions, he rather sets up a useful way to think about the future (see Games Foxes Play). This generally involves choosing two major axes (ie political stability & financial stability) and looking at the 4 scenario combinations that result. The method focuses the mind on what is important. At the moment, the "Golden Western Cape" seems to be a very important emerging trend property-wise.
My blood runs cold when I read that the Western Cape is "golden". Read between the lines and you see a future emerging that I want no part of. My "golden" scenario is as follows:
1. The Reverse Great Trek begins: increasing numbers of gatvol white people move to the Cape "for the lifestyle" (translate as "to get away from The Crahm and The Blex"). Property prices in the Cape go through the roof. Nobody under 35 can afford to own even a shoebox.
2. The Trekkers bring with them extreme racial prejudice (old-time Northern Transvaal cracker attitudes spiced up with recent trauma - they feel that they have been chased from their homes, enough to racialise and radicalise even the most liberal among them)
3. They also bring with them their aesthetics: the southern suburbs start looking like the northern suburbs, and the northern suburbs start looking like Fourways.
4. With Cape Town and the Winelands effectively turned into a reactionary facebrick volkstaat, national government goes out of its way to sabotage the province. The constitution is changed to merge the Western and Eastern Cape, and a final wave of mass migration from the EC is carried out specifically to screw over whites: the creation of Hout Bay-style townships happens in Stellenbosch, Franschoek, Durbanville, Constantia - anywhere that will really get under the skins of the crusty landed gentry.
5. With their province highly racialised, tense, angry, and ludicrously expensive, liberal Capeys and most under-35s leave the country in search of greener pastures. You can still make a killing, you can still have the fantasy life with the palm trees and pool behind the razor wire, but why would you want that in a fractured country: a banana republic in the north, a last outpost of capitalist white rage in the south.
No thanks.
Ya - the above scenario is called "Fortress Constantia" in Clem's book "Games Foxes Play" which describes scenario planning done by Cape Town City officials. They key thing that distinguishes this from a golden scenario is the extent to which the province spreads the wealth effect created by a growing concentration of well educated and high earning potential individuals, and how we all cooperate with those efforts. Are we really heading for a "new Orania", "fortress Constantia" or is there enough intelligence around to know that more effective wealth sharing is essential to maintain one of the best lifestyles the world has to offer?
It will be interesting to see how DA/ID alignment nudges this towards a better outcome.
"It will be interesting to see how DA/ID alignment nudges this towards a better outcome."
Is there a single policy advocated by these parties that could be interpreted as a desire to secure this outcome? DA has allocated less than 1% of the WCape budget to informal settlements. The province will be paying off the cost of larnie Seapoint's stadium, bus stops and gardens for the next decade or more. DA knows what side it's bread is buttered on.
The DA had no choice about the location of the new stadium. In fact if I remember correctly Zille (at the time mayor of CT) wanted the stadium on the Flats or to upgrade Newlands (which would have cost a tenth of the cost of the new stadium).
FIFA said no thank you and got the national govt to put the kibosh on those ideas.
you guys should get out to Khayelitsha some time. roads are being up graded along with pavements and planting trees etc. Definitely some kind of civic improvement that was begun while Helen was mayor. The cynical amongst us might say that the da has decided to target black middle class before worrying about those unfortunates stuck in squatter camps. But I was quite impressed with what i saw.
Post a Comment