Cape Town’s Greenmarket Square, once a vibrant home for families, has become a playground for rich tourists. Old houses are now fancy suites, and prices for everything have shot up. This means real families and long-time shops are being pushed out, making way for visitors who pay a lot for a short stay. It’s like the heart of the city is changing from a cozy home into a fancy hotel, leaving local people struggling.
How has Cape Town’s property boom impacted its historic Greenmarket Square?
Cape Town’s property boom has transformed Greenmarket Square, converting historic homes into expensive “boutique hospitality suites” for tourists, tripling rents, displacing long-term residents, and altering local businesses. This economic shift prioritizes short-term rentals and tourist amenities over community needs and affordable housing, creating a stark contrast between affluent visitors and struggling locals.
1. The Square That Forgot How To Sleep
Dusk in Greenmarket Square feels like velvet, yet the yellow-wood floors inside the national-monument houses no longer creak under family cooking pots. Instead, roller-bags click across 300-year-old planks while motion-sensor LEDs flick on for travellers who open laptops to upload sunset selfies tagged #blessed. A decade ago 92 permanent neighbours called the block home; today the municipal roll lists three. The remaining gabled shells have quietly morphed into “boutique hospitality suites” that pull in roughly R 22 000 a suite each month, almost triple the city’s median wage. The corner café run by 71-year-old Mr. Arendse has swapped paraffin and cheap brandy for almond milk and gluten-free snack bars; he has hiked prices four times since 2019. “Visitors don’t blink,” he shrugs, “but my regulars now wave from the pavement they sleep on.”
The swap-out is so complete that guidebooks brag about “living inside history,” rarely mentioning that the history evicted includes great-grandmothers who once hung washing between the ornate gables. Property portals list original slave beams as amenities, hashtagged “authentic.” Aldermen insist no official rezoning happened, yet each sale’s fine print deletes another voter from the precinct roll. Even the church clock strikes differently: instead of calling residents to evening prayer it reminds tourists to meet their Uber Eats driver at the oak door.
Walk across the cobbles at 2 a.m. and you will hear key-boxes click, not babies crying. The night smells of espresso pods and imported reed diffusers, not curry and paraffin. A city heritage plaque praises “living heritage,” but the only life continuously present is the potted ficus that gets five-star reviews for “great Instagram foliage.”
2. The Other Side of the Road: Where “Hotel California” Is Policy
Opposite the filtered-coffee lofts stands a triple-storey known to reporters as “The Mattress House.” Fifty-one tenants share a single legal meter that the landlord – an offshore trust – declared dead years ago. Residents live off a spider web of illegal hook-ups that syphon maybe R 400 of electricity a month from the street pole. Nobody pays formal rent, yet a micro-economy thrives: R 30 a week buys twenty litres of drinkable water carried up three flights; another R 50 secures a floor patch near the one unbroken window. Kids revise maths by the glow of a USB LED dangling from a cracked Nokia power bank. An iron Victorian safe, its door rusted open, doubles as a pantry: maize sacks below, homework folders above. Someone spray-painted “HOTEL CALIFORNIA” across the rust; pre-teens who have never heard the Eagles still smirk because “you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave” sounds like municipal policy.
The building’s pulse starts at 4:45 a.m. when Fundisa Loza trades bedroom slippers for call-centre sneakers. After kissing her daughters, who share one duvet on a fold-out foam slab, she steps over bodies still dozing and heads into the pre-dawn smell of ammonia and orange peel left by the night-cleaning trucks. By 5:15 she is wearing a headset, apologising to a London shopper whose parcel landed in a recycling bin. The shift ends at 2 p.m.; she may pause at the Methodist church for R 5 soup and a free socket to top up her power bank. Fourteen months ago rent in Langa jumped to R 6 500 for an asbestos backyard room with no toilet, so she moved to the CBD. “At least walking to work costs nothing,” she says – free being a word measured in blistered feet, not rand.
Freedom, however, comes arm-in-arm with the Anti-Land-Invasion Unit. The crew – yellow vests over bullet-proof plates – photographs beds, plastic stoves, school reports, anything that will later “prove” residents can live elsewhere. Their budget ballooned 40 percent in three years, double the rise in public-housing allocation. Their pickups carry angle-grinders; videos show them singing struggle anthems while smacking apart plywood shacks. After every raid mattresses sometimes pop back within hours, yet energy drains away: someone always misses the WhatsApp alert, a child loses a uniform, an asthmatic grandfather sleeps under the stars. Lawyers label the tactic “lawfare by attrition,” a slow bleed of time and spirit.
3. The Hydra Heads of a Property Boom
Cape Town’s real-estate surge is not one monster but a many-headed hydra. One head belongs to the venture-capital consortium that paid R 28 million in 2017 for a crumbling office block, turfed out the last unionised secretaries, painted the stairwells teal, and rebranded the space “The Lofts @ Heritage Square.” Forty-eight micro-units now fetch R 1 200 a night from laptop nomads. Another head wears a municipal tag: the same councillor who votes to “investigate Airbnb regulation” privately forwards constituents the business card of a “reliable short-term agent.” A third head is the state itself – provincial transport bureaucrats rent 78 tourist flats on month-to-month corporate contracts while the MyCiTi bus expansion stalls. Each room is expensed at holiday rates because no procurement clause bans it.
Data crunchers translate the hype into body counts. Dr Cleo St-Hilaire overlays Airbnb occupancy on child-asthma clinic visits: where tourist lets exceed 30 percent of apartments, emergency wheeze cases spike 17 percent. Impermanent neighbours rarely report mould, burn dodgy paraffin, or chase dumpers. Dr Jens Horber’s spreadsheet shows that for every R 100 jump in the surrounding nightly rate, eviction filings rise 0.4 percent the next quarter, a Pearson correlation of 0.78 – close to perfect. The city’s own 2023 tourism review admits “externalities exist,” then concludes that “destination marketing remains paramount,” bureaucrat-speak for: the goose still lays Instagrammable eggs.
Barcelona, Lisbon and Berlin have tried to clip the wings. Catalonia’s 30-day annual cap sliced listings 27 percent but birthed “mega-flats” where investors punched holes between units and now sleep sixteen Germans under one licence. Lisbon’s permit freeze shoved demand to commuter towns, cramming early-morning trains. Berlin’s misappropriation ban survived court, yet enforcement gobbled 400 new staff and a €2.5 million software suite – funds Cape Town’s treasury calls “science-fiction.” Capital mutates faster than clauses: a local developer already sells “co-ownership” slices; buy 1/12 of a flat, holiday one month, collect 8 percent yield the rest of the year. Because no shareholder exceeds 10 percent, hotel-conversion bylaws slip off the hook.
4. Micro-Solidarities vs. The Platform Goliath
Activists refuse to wait for slow-grinding legislatures. Reclaim the City, founded in 2016, occupies courtrooms as vigorously as derelict buildings. Forty-seven filed cases have stalled eviction long enough for 300 pupils to sit final exams. Their latest tool is “crowd-servitude,” a cheeky booking platform that lets verified locals reserve an Airbnb night, sleep in a resident’s bedroom instead, pay the host R 200 (half the cleaning fee) and gift the balance to the legal fund. The goal is to divert tourist cash toward defence coffers. Early metrics show 1 200 solidarity sleepovers in six months, enough to bankroll two public-interest advocates. The tourism board yells “fraud”; the Public Protector’s inbox is still thinking about it.
Algorithms can fight for the poor too. A UCT postgraduate built machine-learning code that scans estate-agent photos – rolled-up carpets, empty fridges, generic beach prints – and flags buildings about to flip. Neighbourhood teams armed with stokvel savings sometimes beat investors at their own game: sixty-seven domestic workers pooled R 2.3 million, outbid a Dubai fund and turned an ex-backpackers into a cooperative offering nineteen long-term flats. Levies stay under R 900; balconies drip with spinach and tomatoes. Chairperson Ms Nofemela welcomes foreign scholars to the roof for R 150 a night, breakfast of amagwinya and house-made jam included. “We’re not against sharing,” she laughs, “only against stealing whole neighbourhoods.”
Even the Mattress House writes its own footnotes to power. At twilight someone jury-rigs a cracked Bluetooth speaker to the communal strip; kwaito classic “We Love Our Azania” rattles the broken panes. Toddlers clap, teens rehearse dance moves between mattresses, grannies mouth the lyrics. For three minutes no one mentions court dates or water bills. When the battery croaks the room slips back to low murmurs of tomorrow’s survival plans. Outside, a newly landed Amsterdammer asks Google Maps for “authentic local culture,” unaware it is humming behind a graffiti-scarred door he assumes is just another ruin.
What is happening in Cape Town’s Greenmarket Square?
Greenmarket Square, once a residential hub, is transforming into a tourist-centric area. Historic homes are being converted into expensive “boutique hospitality suites,” leading to a significant increase in rents and the displacement of long-term residents and local businesses. This shift prioritizes short-term rentals and tourist amenities over the needs of the local community.
How has the property boom affected local residents and businesses?
The property boom has led to a drastic reduction in permanent residents in Greenmarket Square, with only three listed compared to 92 a decade ago. Rents have nearly tripled, forcing out families. Local businesses, like Mr. Arendse’s corner café, have had to hike prices and change their offerings to cater to affluent tourists, making them unaffordable for long-time regulars. This has created a divide where locals are struggling while visitors enjoy luxury.
What are “boutique hospitality suites” and what is their impact?
“Boutique hospitality suites” are historic homes in Greenmarket Square that have been converted into high-end accommodation for tourists. They generate significant income, nearly triple the city’s median wage per suite per month. While guidebooks promote them as an opportunity to “live inside history,” this conversion has effectively evicted the long-standing community, replacing local life with temporary tourist stays and altering the cultural fabric of the area.
How are some residents coping with displacement and lack of affordable housing?
Some displaced residents, like those in “The Mattress House,” live in precarious conditions. They share overcrowded spaces, rely on illegal electricity hook-ups, and pay for basic necessities like water. Fundisa Loza, for example, moved to the CBD to walk to work after rent in Langa became unaffordable, highlighting the extreme measures people take to adapt. Activist groups like Reclaim the City also work to stall evictions and create alternative housing solutions.
What are the broader impacts of Cape Town’s real estate surge?
The real estate surge in Cape Town is multifaceted, driven by venture capital, municipal actions, and even state entities. It leads to increased eviction filings and health issues like a 17% spike in child asthma cases in areas with high tourist rentals. While the city acknowledges “externalities,” it prioritizes “destination marketing.” Other cities like Barcelona, Lisbon, and Berlin have attempted to regulate short-term rentals with mixed results, showing the difficulty in controlling the rapid mutation of capital.
How are activists and communities fighting back against these changes?
Activists are employing various strategies. Reclaim the City uses legal challenges to stall evictions and has created a “crowd-servitude” booking platform to divert tourist money to legal funds. Communities are also pooling resources, like the sixty-seven domestic workers who outbid a Dubai fund to create cooperative housing. Additionally, technology is being used, with machine-learning code identifying properties about to flip, allowing communities to potentially intervene. These efforts demonstrate local resilience and innovative approaches to preserve community and affordable housing.
