SLR: Bishopscourt's R189-million question: Who is Cape Town for?

This article was first published by The Common Sense.Globally famous podcaster Steven Bartlett wants R189 million for his Bishopscourt house — nearly double what he paid two years ago. Fair price, or symptom? Simon Lincoln Reader uses the sale to unpack the digital-nomad economy remaking the Cape Town property market: Zoomers with laptops and matcha driving prices beyond the reach of locals who've owned for decades. He widens the lens to a bigger fight — Palmer Luckey versus Paul Graham on who a country's jobs are for — and asks whether Cape Town's boom is proof of success, or the same story London told itself before its property became a warlord's safety deposit box..By Simon Lincoln Reader for The Common Sense.In the enduring fire of the southern suburbs’ property market in Cape Town, another can of petrol has exploded. A man called Steven Bartlett is selling his house in Bishopscourt for nearly twice the price he purchased it for a mere two years ago.Bartlett is the founder of the Diary of a CEO podcast. He also appeared on Dragons’ Den as an investor, the insufferable British Broadcasting Corporation reality series where business owners line up to score a piecemeal, very British investment from a bunch of bastards and bastardesses cosplaying Carl Icahn or Paul Singer, saying goodbye to their precious work in the performance.I once tried to swallow my fist during an episode of Dragons’ Den. A lady I knew called Fiona was presenting her dried seaweed business, harvested off the coast of Scotland with the help of two strapping Pacific Islanders. I didn’t think it was a good idea. Unfortunately, I was right. Fiona’s numbers weren’t up to snuff and the thickest of the dragons, a scowling girl-boss called Deborah Meaden, started attacking poor Fiona, scolding her on live television.After the episode I thought about getting Deborah Meaden banned from South Africa. She’d made her fortune in bingo halls and from sending middle-England boomers to Spain where they marauded through city alleys on mobility scooters and shovelled English breakfasts into their faces. So I typed a petition to the Department of Home Affairs warning them that this mad cow threatened to turn the whole of Cape Town into Fish Hoek or Margate, still in drafts.Whether he likes it or not, Bartlett is one of the kingpins of the worldwide digital nomad trend, where (mostly) Zoomer girls take Airbnbs in Sea Point and drink matcha and stare at a screen all day. Only slightly more tolerable than influencers, this business-class Roma influence on cities has led to righteous protestation from outpriced locals.Not PopularBartlett, despite his success, isn’t universally popular. The fourth wave feminists aren’t fans. They think every time he talks business it's code for taking transgenders into forests and chopping them up. Perhaps these geniuses haven’t heard you are not allowed to talk about Africans like that (Bartlett was born in Botswana).The problem of Barlett’s sale is the suspicion that the Cape Town property market is becoming the scene of a drunken auction. Bishopscourt is a prosperous suburb where many of my friends live. None of them paid R189 million for their properties (around £8.75 million), which is what Bartlett is asking. Most sweat spinal fluid to maintain their land, nipped at the heels by rate increases or Geordin Hill-Lewis’s distinctly Lib Dem new reported policy consideration of taxing homes with dogs.What we’re ultimately looking at here is the idea of belonging, and the fissures around its edges. It’s not a unique issue. We’ve witnessed elite indignation for the expression of March and March, for Orania, nationalist movements in Europe, and it’s happening in America too, albeit in a different form.BarneyThe question of who a land and its inventory is meant to serve can be found in a recent barney between two tech bros. On one side is a billionaire called Palmer Luckey, the founder of Anduril, a defence and technology contractor supplying drones to the likes of Ukraine. On the other, another billionaire called Paul Graham, the founder of Y Combinator, a venture capital firm out of Silicon Valley.Luckey is aligned to America First. Graham isn’t. Luckey believes American companies should employ Americans before they consider others. Graham thinks jobs should go to the best people, but if you know Y Combinator and its Bonnie Blue administrative style, or Graham from his elitist self-promotion, you’ll notice a few holes.Chiefly, he thinks Indians make the best techies, so supports the HB-1 visa scheme (as Elon Musk did). Paul Graham hates Donald Trump so much that he decamped from San Francisco to the English countryside, far away from the multiculturalism and diversity he pleads. So he’s in the Cotswolds, with its neat country hedges and picturesque stone cottages, shouting at Trump, demanding the administration import more guys from Saharanpur.ClashCape Town is a clash of two instincts. One sees the demonstrable success of foreign investment via tourism; the other reconciles to the provincial, exists as a somewhere, and frowns upon people like Bartlett and Graham, who are clearly any- or everywheres. One takes a macro view, aligned to free trade philosophy that examines change over extended periods; the other looks to the circumstances of Cape Town’s twenty- and thirty-year-olds, and concludes that under present conditions, wealth creation via property ownership as its first advance is an increasingly tough prospect.It is one of the most discomfiting debates of our time where both are wrong and right. Today campaigners point to foreign ownership of London’s property market as a fundamental stroke of social decline. They have a point: for a good four decades, London properties were used not as residences but as safety deposit boxes by dictators, warlords, and gangsters allied to some of the worst regimes. The most effective conditioning for foreign ownership I’ve witnessed exists in pockets of Italy and Portugal: you have to speak the national language. Applied to South Africa, this would mean only the Irish won’t qualify.There is supplementary information about Bartlett that may hint at an answer. Recently Bartlett complained about having two glasses of white wine and feeling terrible for the rest of the week. He wasn’t drinking Australian wine, so he doesn’t appear to have been poisoned. He claims to have felt flat, that it affected his gym routine and fuzzied his thinking..Read more:.Cape Town’s property surge triggers legal battle over new taxes.This is embarrassing, extremely poor form, and very much in sync with Zoomer digitals, who are losing money for wine vineyards and companies by teetotalling, and being very annoying in the process, like those evangelical former coke addicts lining the boulevards of Las Vegas, speaking in tongues to punters exiting the tables. So perhaps the condition should be: if you don’t possess the constitution that allows you to support one of the local economy’s brightest stars, you have zero business coming to Cape Town..This article was first published by The Common Sense and is republished with permission..Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox every morning on weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa's bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here.

SLR: Bishopscourt's R189-million question: Who is Cape Town for?

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