A FAMOUS GROUSE
ALARMING news from up north. An unconfirmed report suggests that, in an orchestrated campaign to sabotage the new DA-led administration in Tshwane, ANC members were selling off plots of land at R100 apiece, which has resulted in several massive land invasions.
If true, this was indeed disturbing, a new low in the exploitation of the desperate. As far as we were aware, here at the Mahogany Ridge, plots of land in Pretoria were not worth much more than R30. Such brazen profiteering was truly shameful.
Still, it did give us some perverse pleasure to note that such a monstrous inflation in property prices was not restricted to Cape Town and that prospective homeowners were being gouged in other parts of the country as well.
But the Mother City remains the prize, and it won’t be too long before none of us, let alone the poor of Woodstock’s Bromwell Street, can afford to live here, and the place will be like Switzerland, full of people with white socks.
Recently, the Financial Times ran a puffy feature on Cape Town in which local realtors jabbered on excitedly about their admittedly enviable lot. Visitors from abroad, it seemed, were fairly falling over themselves in a fevered scramble to snap up homes away from home.