Chapter Three Selling the Mountain: property, housing and neo- apartheid segregation in Hout Bay Figure 3.1. The global property market comes to the fishing village ​ In July 2009, an article in the Sunday Times, the leading national newspaper, claimed that the ​ ​ Sentinel Mountain in Hout Bay was on the property market by auction, and that enquiries had been made by ‘talk show host Oprah Winfrey, hotel magnate Sol Kerzner, Donald Trump jnr as well as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’. In addition, the article continued, ‘the new owners could, if they wished ... name the peak after themselves as the Sentinel was not a registered trademark. Auctioneers had reportedly turned down two offers, including one for R15 1 million’ (News24 2009). Not surprisingly, alarm spread through Hangberg, the major settlement on the Sentinel Mountain. On 16 July 2009, the morning of the auction, a crowd of 300 protesters from Hangberg gathered outside the site of the sale, the Chapman’s Peak Hotel, led by the Hout Bay Civic. According to Isaac James, a Hout Bay Civic leader, they wanted to ‘sit down with the auctioneers' to convince the owners to halt plans to sell the prized real estate (News24 2009). However, once it was clear that the auction was proceeding, the protest became confrontational. Some protesters began to throw stones, and the police opened fire on the crowd, showering them with rubber bullets and teargas. This confrontation quickly brought the auction to a halt. In the aftermath of this event, it transpired that it was not the whole of the Sentinel Mountain for sale, which would have included Hangberg on its lower reaches. Instead, it was two portions above the settlement, officially Erf 3557, bordered on either side by the Table Mountain National Park. The land was owned by G&R Marine Services CC that bought it in 2003 for R60,000. The lower portion of 60 hectares abutting Hangberg was sold off to Sanparks for R800,000 shortly after the protest (Moneyweb 2010). The higher portion of 100 hectares that remained was surrounded on every side by the national park, and negotiations ensued to sell it to Sanparks. The Sentinel protest shines a spotlight on the precariousness of long-standing residents in Hangberg, many of whom had suffered displacement under apartheid, and the majority of whom do not have private tenure rights nor the wealth to acquire them. Despite generations of living on the Sentinel Mountain and working on the sea of Hout Bay, Hangberg residents’ right to belong appeared to be under threat, this time by the (global) property market. While this particular case was driven by a misperception fanned by the media, it heightened insecurities of belonging in Hangberg significantly and, according to some local leaders, contributed substantially to the ‘Battle of Hangberg’ in 2010 (PMF 2017), that is the violent resistance that followed attempts to remove informal settlers discussed in Chapter Four. * * * * In addition to insight into the politics of place in Hout Bay, the incident of ‘sale of the Sentinel’ is an entry point to the political economy of urban property in post-apartheid South Africa, and indeed in many cities in the world where market relations shape who gets access to what kind of place. In particular, it alerts us to the impact of international and national market relations on urban land, and the way that market actors and especially property developers can shape middle-class and wealthy urbanisms, but in ways that often impact directly and indirectly on the poor. Indeed, this outcome is almost assured given the weak spatial governance of urbanisation 2 in South Africa, and the demonstrable incapacity of the state to supply enough housing for working and poor in-migrants. Thus, where people live in the city is still a product of processes ​ ​ beyond immediate state control, and therefore disconnected from formal democracy. In addition to accounting for where people live in Hout Bay, this chapter explores some dimensions of how they live too, by tracing the relationship between market, developmental and ​ ​ informal governance and the urbanisms of local place. By urbanisms, we mean both the nature of the built environment, its spatial layout and architecture, and the everyday needs that living in this built environment imposes. We begin by outlining the agenda-setting power of market forces in shaping the spatiality, design and lifestyles of middle-class and wealthy residents in Hout Bay. Unable and perhaps reluctant to change fundamental patterns of land occupation, the state focuses its transformatory energies, and significant resources, on developmental governance such as housing in poor areas like Imizamo Yethu and Hangberg. At the same time, the state is incapable of keeping up with demand for housing created by urbanisation and, in this gap, informal settlement and practices have grown. The combined effects of market, public and informal governance around residential property in Hout Bay is dividing residential property into ‘green’ areas, ‘post-public’ wealthy places governed by market relations, and ‘grey areas’ of blurred formality/informality where residents are treated by the state as populations to be governed and/or informal encroachers who attempt to avoid the state. We term this emergent spatial segregation of settlement neo- apartheid as it has both social (racial) and political (divergent forms of governance) features similar to the past, but also differences – it is driven by economic processes, and the developmental energies and financial investment of the state is now focused mostly on poor, black areas. In outlining the evolution of neo-apartheid, we demonstrate the substantial ‘power to produce’ the built environment of both market actors and residents themselves compared to state actors. Indeed, both often proceed against the will of some set of local residents, including long-standing white residents of the Valley. This relative power of market and informal practice, combined with the City’s de facto lack of authority over spatial development, exposes a disconnect ​ ​ between local democracy and attempts to manage urbanisation in Hout Bay. The Valley: From White Countryside to Wealthy Security Estates Chapter One described the evolution of Hout Bay from an agricultural and fishing area to a white residential area, especially from the 1950s onwards. To a significant extent the transformation of farming land into residential land in the Valley followed the pattern of the ‘crabgrass frontier’ that Kenneth Jackson (1985) coined to described the large plots, with manicured lawns and leafy 3 gardens, that typified the growth of suburbia in the United States. From the 1980s however, and especially after apartheid, the pattern of settlement began to change with densification of the suburbs, the emergence of new malls, and the growth of security estates. Notably this kind of transformation at this time was not unique in South Africa, nor globally. Martin Murray (2015: 180) argues that many cities around the world began to produce a post- suburban landscape from the 1970s and 1980s as ‘edge’ cities formed when residential suburbs evolved into ‘semi-autonomous’ outer cities, situated along orbital roads, ‘that rival and often surpass the traditional big city downtowns as vibrant centres of socioeconomic power and commercial vitality’. Murray places private real estate developers at the centre of this transformation. Orientated to affluent consumers, they provide residential neighbourhoods ‘with varying degrees of exclusivity, shopping arcades and recreational facilities’ (Murray 2015: 183). Hence the emergence of wealthy ‘enclaves, islands and bubbles’ that are ‘post-public spaces’ of shopping malls, themed casinos, redeveloped urban commercial zones and themed entertainment centres (184). In this consumerist landscape, shopping malls have become the informal capitals of suburbia: ‘they represent places to congregate, to socialise, and to seek ambience and connections with others’ (186). While not an ‘edge city’ as it is too small and lacks enough of the commercial and light industrial aspect, Hout Bay reflects many of Murray’s features of a developer-driven landscape. This includes the growth of an Olympic size mall in the central shopping area, the dramatic growth in property prices in the Valley, and especially the flourishing of a significant number of gated communities, particularly in the last ten years. Consequently, private property today in the Valley is expensive. According to Property24 (2016) the average sale price for houses in Hout ​ ​ Bay in 2016 is R3,600,000 ($300,000), more than double the boom price of ten years previously. Further, in an interview with an online property website, an estate agent from Lew Geffen Sotherby’s International Realty stated: In 2011 the average house price was R2.81 million and sectional title properties sold for an average of R1.2m. ... By 2015 the average house price had almost doubled to just under R4.1m and the sectional title median price had increased by 41% to just over R1.7m (Terri Steyn Lew Geffen Sotherby’s, Propertywheel 2016). She added that there has also been a marked drop in the length of time properties remain on the market: In 2011 the average length of time across the board was 159 days, with several properties remaining on the market for more than 400 days and some even for longer than 500 days. ... In 2015 the average time spent on the market had dropped by 21% to 126 days with 4 very few properties remaining on the market for longer than 200 days, but desirable properties in secure estates sell much faster (Terri Steyn Lew Geffen Sotherby’s, Propertywheel 2016). Another estate agent gave a similar average house price of R3.5 million. He also noted that Hout Bay features in the top five suburbs in Cape Town in terms of growth price over the last five years, and is in the top ten most expensive suburbs overall (Estate agent 1 2017), in a city that houses nine of the ten most expensive suburbs in South Africa (BusinessTech 2017).