When Paul Emmanuel bought a loft in central Johannesburg’s Milpark two years ago, it was a virtual no-go area. The building was in a desolate industrial quarter abutting downtown, flanked by forlorn-looking gas tanks emblazoned with the word eGoli, Johannesburg’s Zulu name, meaning “city of gold”. Crime and neglect had long since sent most middle-class residents running to the gated streets and walled houses of the suburbs.
Emmanuel, a 36-year-old visual artist, then had a tiny apartment in Sandton, an upscale but antiseptic suburb that he now describes as “quite boring”. Enticed by the thought of high ceilings and abundant light, he put a small down-payment on a 200 sq metre space costing R345,000 (£30,000) in a former knitting factory. “I thought of it as a calculated risk,” he says. “It was a bit scary but I intuitively knew I was doing the right thing.”
Two years later, his building sits in the middle of a growing urban hub. A new retail complex next door includes the Colour Bar, a popular nightspot and a shop selling Le Creuset cookware. A film studio operates out of a disused bakery across the street and two more loft developments are under construction.
Going prices for lofts in Emmanuel’s development have more than quadrupled from what he paid in 2003. Best of all, he says, “I can go downstairs and buy milk and eggs next door.”
Stories about artists blazing trails into urban sinkholes are common currency – not to say old news – in the cities of Europe and the US. But the nascent gentrification of downtown Johannesburg is remarkable given the city centre’s tumultuous recent history and the depths to which it had sunk. In the final years of apartheid, ruling-class Jo’burgers, along with many businesses, fled rising crime and an influx of poor migrants downtown and relocated to neighbourhoods outside the city. To this day, much business and commerce cluster around malls in Johannesburg’s northern periphery, including Sandton. Hillbrow, a densely populated neighbourhood in the eastern part of downtown, mostly inhabited by African immigrants, remains a synonym for urban decay.
But developers are moving into other parts of the city centre, capitalising on years of focused regeneration efforts by government planners. A network of closed-circuit cameras in the city’s Central Business District (CBD) has reduced crime by 80 per cent. Main Street, running through the heart of the CBD, has been pedestrianised and beautified over the past year, drawing downtown workers out of their office canteens to eat at Nino’s, a popular outdoor café.
With support from city and provincial authorities, Newtown, a former urban wasteland on the western side of downtown, has been reborn over the past three years as a “cultural precinct”. Recent additions to Newtown’s clutch of theatres, restaurants and clubs include Kaldi’s, a trendy coffeehouse named after an Abyssinian goatherd, and Xarra, a bookstore with a studiously Afrocentric selection.
In the interests of full disclosure, I’ve personally been caught up in the buzz surrounding downtown. In October I made a down-payment on a two-bedroom, R950,000 apartment in a former milling headquarters in Newtown, bought as an investment. (I already own my house in Melville, a central suburb.) The building is still decrepit and its immediate surroundings desolate; I bought off-plan and it will only be ready in a year. So, picturing it in its completed state requires a feat of the imagination.
But with one artsy new office block across the street and more apartments in development, I am betting that Newtown – already a popular nightlife destination – will soon find its stride as a residential neighbourhood. For me, the deal-clincher was the information that Woolworth’s, an upscale retailer similar to the UK’s Marks and Spencer, is poised to move into a new mall development down the street.
Alongside Newtown, the biggest changes happening downtown are in the CBD, where developers are buying up office buildings for residential conversions. Urban Ocean, the biggest investor to date, says it has sold 15 units in the Corner House, an iconic former haunt of the “randlord” mining barons of South Africa’s colonial era. It also plans to open another city centre office-to-residential conversion, the Franklin, early next year, and recently bought several other buildings downtown.
Developers frequently invoke the 2010 football World Cup, which South Africa will host, in their sales pitches. The tournament will entail a flurry of new construction in and near downtown, including the building of the Gautrain, a new light-rail network. Businesses headquartered downtown, including mining group Anglo American and banks Absa and Standard Bank, employ 70,000 workers, most of whom commute home to distant suburbs, according to Urban Ocean’s Alfonso Botha. “If 1 per cent of them move back to the city, that will exceed the number of units we have available,” he says.
However, many Jo’burgers remain sceptical about the prospects of city-centre development. Cape Town recently saw a similar boom in office-to-residential conversions in its rejuvenating downtown, but new developments have outpaced the number of people who want to live there, leaving a glut of buy-to-let apartments seeking renters.
Johannesburg’s centre is more blighted and busy than Cape Town’s, and was never in its history primarily residential. Parking is scarce and street hawkers and honking taxis crowd the CBD’s narrow one-way streets. In spite of some new developments in Newtown, decent housing for the middle- and low-income people who make up most of Johannesburg’s inhabitants remains in critically short supply, leading to continued overcrowding and crime in places like Hillbrow. “The city isn’t really ready for high-income people,” says Neil Fraser of Urban Inc, a Johannesburg consulting practice focusing on urban regeneration.
Also, downtown living is a radically new concept for bourgeois South Africans, who are as wedded to their cars as Californians. The Gautrain, designed to begin whisking commuters from downtown Johannesburg to the northern suburbs and the capital, Pretoria, by 2010, has been plagued by delays. Urban Ocean and other developers are trying to attract upscale retail tenants to the CBD, but few have moved yet. “Downtown Jo’burg has beautiful buildings, but none of them has parking,” says Ricci Polack of Lifestyle Lofts, the development abutting the area where Emmanuel lives. “You walk out of the building and you’re in downtown Africa,” he adds. “I wouldn’t go live there and I’m a pioneer.”
Downtown investors are paying what look like high prices, he adds, with some units selling at R8,000 per sq metre, compared with the R3,000 per sq metre he charges for shells in his development. Economists have warned of a dangerous housing-price bubble, which some say could begin deflating as soon as an anticipated interest-rate hike in December.
Polack’s development, the Refinery, bears the hallmarks of a success. Its first phase was snapped up; a second phase is now under development. Residents have access to maid service, a gym and a communal teppanyaki grill. Security, says Polack, who has a loft in the building, is remarkable by Johannesburg standards. “I’ve lived here two and a half years,” he says, “and I’ve never had a front door key.”
