Cape Town Locals: We're Priced Out of Downtown

Cape Town's postcard views are colliding with a housing crunch that locals say is pushing them out of the city's core. In a dispatch from South Africa for the New York Times, John Eligon uses one slick condo, the Sage—where more than a third of units are short-term rentals going for roughly $350 a night—to illustrate a broader shift: about 70% of downtown residential space is now taken up by hotels or Airbnb-style stays. Workers such as telemarketer Lizanne Domingo, who commutes two hours each way from a distant settlement, argue the city center is effectively being refashioned for visitors and wealthier newcomers, not longtime Capetonians.

Officials counter that tourism brings 210,000 jobs and $1.7 billion a year, and say migration from other provinces and limited land are the bigger drivers of soaring prices. Yet with no government-subsidized units built downtown since apartheid ended, battles over evictions, stalled housing promises, and proposed taxes on short-term rentals have become flash points in a city where luxury apartments sit near informal settlements of tin shacks. For the full on-the-ground picture, read the full story.