The Cape Town Central City Improvement District (CCID) recently attended the annual conference of the Western Cape Property Development Forum (WCPDF), held at the Century City Conference Centre from 10 to 11 May 2018.
Looking to address the question posed by the conference organisers “What infrastructure, policy, partnership and collaborations are required to maximise economic development potential in the Western Cape”, the CCID’s Communications manager, Carola Koblitz, presented a paper entitled “Utilising data to establish benchmarks for downtown growth and prosperity.”
Says Carola: “We presented a paper that drew on the experience of the CCID’s own data collection over the past 18 years of our existence, concentrating not only on our methods of collection but also on the partnerships and collaborative engagements that have been essential to both the origination and dissemination of our data.”
The paper looked at the history of the CCID’s data collection in terms of how it originally began (back in 2000 when the CCID was established), as a tool to understand the operational requirements of a city improvement district:
“In the early days of our existence,” says Carola, “with the CCID being the City of Cape Town’s first city improvement district and therefore the experimental playing field for the concept, we basically had no idea as to what services were required. But there was enormous pressure to make it work. So, the CCID started to count, quite literally, everything we did – from how much litter we removed and incidents of graffiti tagging we cleaned, to how our numbers of public safety officers were deployed on the ground and what they encountered.”
As time progressed, the databases were expanded to include everything from the numbers of businesses in town (at both ground floor and above-groundfloor levels), the numbers of parking bays in town and even the numbers of educational institutes, government offices and their staff complements as well as how many members of the public these offices serviced daily.
Fast forward to 2012, when the first The State of Cape Town Central City Report was published: “By this time, we realised we had enough data to begin extensive analysis on the economic climate of the Central City, and we knew where to look to complement this data even further in terms of the value of developments taking place, and the performance of the residential market.”
The WCPDF conference was also an excellent opportunity to network with the property industry at large and gain insights into the various challenges that faced it. “There was, for example, a great deal of discussion on the affordable accommodation market, with constant challenges posed to property developers in terms of how they could embrace concepts such as inclusionary housing even before something like this becomes part of a legislative policy. This is of course something we would really welcome in the Central City – for property developers to take the initiative in terms of how to deliver affordable accommodation to downtown professionals and perhaps even come up with innovative suggestions to place before government for consideration.
Other speakers at the conference included representatives from the Western Cape Government (with an opening address by Minister Alan Winde of the Ministry of Economic Opportunities), various City of Cape Town departments, The University of Cape Town’s Urban Real Estate Research Unit, as well as the private sector.
Image by Property Wheel