Just like pornography, the frothy end of our property market is distorted, artificially enhanced and morally wrong, says Mike Wills.
Cape Town - Property porn is addictive. Estate agents at the high end of the Cape Town market love to taunt us with glossy centrefolds of skimpy Clifton bungalows selling for R46 million and buxom Constantia estates with vineyards attached, theoretically commanding rental of R80 000 a month. I know I shouldn’t look at this stuff because it objectivises houses and gives me unhealthy and unachievable fantasies that impact on my real relationships with bricks and mortar, but I just can’t help myself.
These property peddlers also drop tasty headline stories into the media like the one this weekend of the “mysterious Nigerian chief” who allegedly paid R78m for two apartments in Mouille Point and is knocking them together into the “ultimate 360° penthouse”.
Who is this chief (is his first name Goodluck, by any chance?), how did he get his money and is he happy that his mouthy estate agents have been telling the world about his dealings? And that’s before we get to asking about the sanity of spending R160 000/m2. And then we can pose some nasty conundrums for him about Gini coefficients and wealth disparity.
Mystery Chief might also want to know about the threats the EFF is making. Bishopscourt, Rondebosch and Camps Bay were specified in an interview the party’s Western Cape leader Nazier Paulsen gave on the subject of possible land invasions, but I’m sure his Fighters would be more than happy to occupy a Mouille Point penthouse. Just like pornography, we know the frothy end of our property market is distorted, artificially enhanced and morally wrong. It feels like the ultimate two fingers to both sanity and poverty. It also wrenches the rest of the market out of shape for everyone else.
Interestingly, that bastion of unbridled capitalism, The Economist magazine, agrees with this perception. In its latest issue, the hymn sheet of the wealthy advances a compelling case that the grotesque distortions in property prices in prime urban spaces represent a choke chain on growth which in the US alone could be costing the economy 6.5 percent in GDP, or $1 trillion. The key cause of this is the ever increasing amount of regulations “on the height and density of buildings (which) constrains supply and inflates prices”.
While those codes were well motivated in the first place, they have become a “pernicious mechanism through which landowners are handed unwarranted windfalls and the means to prevent others from exercising control over their property”. Put simply, if there is a massive demand for property in Camps Bay, why not allow developers to create more supply by building upwards?
Before you choke on your croissant, I know it’s not that simple and we need regulation to retain our natural heritage and to deliver a coherent, enforceable framework for development, but those of us who have highly-priced property need to understand just how counter-productive and self-interested our arguments really are.
* Mike Wills’ column Open Mike appears in the Cape Argus every Wednesday.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
Cape Argus