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Showing posts from December, 2015

Letter in Cape Times 29th December 2015 "Ratepayers Ignored in City's Grand Centralisation Scheme"

Letter in today's Cape Times "Ratepayers Ignored in City's Grand Centralisation Scheme" I live in the City of Cape Town, so I will use the City of Cape Town as my example, but I believe this example to be applicable to Johannesburg and other parts of South Africa. The City, which works for its corporate citizens, providing them with a "red tape to red carpet" special service that us mere mortals can only dream of, is implementing a massive growth strategy to increase square meters of office, conference, hotel and private living space in the Central Business District (CBD) and close to it. This makes the land in the CBD much more valuable, making billions for the property developers and hundreds of millions in additional rates annually for the city. People are forced to travel into the city where in the rest of the word, cities are moving to decentralised "pod" offices as Shelley Childs wrote about in your newspaper recently. At the same t