AFFORDABLE RENTALS IN CAPE TOWN Most businesses today are killed by high rentals. Twelve years ago, I saw West End and the Arena in the V&A Waterfront close because the rent had become astronomical at over R70k per month. Just last year Manenberg was evicted because the venue could no longer afford to pay the rent – over R80k per month. Manenberg occupied a space that was less than a fifth of the space occupied by West End/Arena.

 

Over 500 small and medium-sized businesses have been forced to close their doors in Cape Town’s CBD in the past 18-month alone.

But some are not as unfortunate.

Sail-Stadefrance, the company who was awarded the tender to operate Greenpoint stadium, secured a contract that would have seen them pay a leasing fee of R100 000 per year, for the stadium.
That’s less than R300 a day.
To hire the stadium for a day for an event would probably cost me in the region of R100 000, so it would be fair to say that Sail-Stadafrance got a very good deal.

But this is South Africa, and one thing we can depend on in South Africa is incompetence.

Cape Town seems to have developed a special affinity to miscalculations and typos that result in million dollar blunders.

It turns out that ‘errors in the document’s text and figures’ may result in Sail-Stadafrance only having to pay R1 a year!

Then again, as the Greenpoint Ratepayers Association points out, relative to the cost of building the stadium – in the region of R7-billion – the difference between R1 and R100 000 is actually negligible.

Both amounts are pitiful in terms of an annual rent for such a structure.
The maintenance of the place will probably cost the taxpayer more than R100 000 a week.

In fact, that R100 000 per week is hardly enough to line the coffers of those responsible for maintaining the stadium, so I doubt whether there will be anything left to spend on actual maintenance anyway.

Kader Khan
Editor
info@yummie.co.za