Inner cities – surviving Covid-19

The Felix

If inner cities are to survive and thrive, commercial property and business owners need to think out of the box, says Rob Kane, CEO of Boxwood Property Fund and chairperson of the Cape Town Central City Improvement District (CCID). Here’s how Boxwood set out to seduce employees back to a warmer, more tactile, softer work environment.

We have an enormous opportunity to attract talent from all over the world to work here: 52 % of South Africa’s fintech start-ups are located in Cape Town. Amazon’s intended new campus speaks to this trend, as does the new, and very bold, Luno sign in the Central City.

Boxwood is one of the larger office landlords in Cape Town’s Central Business District (CBD). Our focus is to buy run-down office buildings with potential – and then to upgrade them. Over the last two years we have learnt some valuable lessons and we have been humbled and enriched in the process.

Covid-19 demanded that we reinvent our approach to our buildings, to our neighbours, to the streetscape and to our tenants. The result is that our redeveloped buildings are more people-focused; they are also more adventurous.

A CHANGING CITY

Pre-Covid-19, we intended starting development work worth R900million. This plan needed a rapid rethink as, unsurprisingly, most property owners cut all building spend to the bone. There was zero visibility of when (or if) Covid would end, and the media was swamped with articles predicting the end of CBDs. It was scary to contemplate.

Our response was to drill into why

The Box

The Box

cities exist. Large cities have been around for over 2 000 years and the essence of their longevity is that people want to gather together.

A key component of this is that we are social beings. One of my “lockdown books” spoke to the reason why Homo sapiens triumphed over the much stronger and bigger-brained Neanderthal: the latter was a loner, and the former was a social being. Being social made us more efficient and allowed us to work collectively to outwit the Neanderthals. 14 Long

ACCELERATE REDEVELOPMENT

At Boxwood, we concluded that a nasty virus and fast Wi-Fi at home was going to change, but not destroy, our city centres. As a result, we halted our large development but decided to accelerate the redevelopment of three significant office buildings at a cost of about R70 million. We were certainly swimming against the tide.

When lockdown eased and we were allowed back to the office, the team spent an afternoon testing our new strategy.

We walked the streets of downtown Cape Town and viewed about 25 buildings, including our own. The results were shocking. We could not find one foyer that we loved. Almost without exception, the offices were utterly faceless and uniformly boring.

In addition, the streets felt hard as nails. After 15 months of home comforts, how could anyone find this environment appealing? We knew that being in an office was more efficient for business, but we also knew that we had to entice and seduce office workers back to the inner city.

They would want a warmer, more tactile and softer work experience. And when they stepped onto the street, that street would need to be interesting, have a vibe to it, and be able to entertain.

OVERLY CORPORATE

We realised that our pre-Covid-19 concepts were hard and “corporate”, so we had to start again. Our catchphrase was “sophisticated but quirky”. Consequently, our buildings are more people-focused, have bold, fun colours, and spill on to beautiful streetscapes.

We are planting trees, have commissioned lots of street art and have built stylish atriums as chill/ work/entertainment areas. We’ve built food markets, made lovely “pause” areas, started collaborating with adjacent property owners to create friendly precincts, and importantly, created environments where small entrepreneurs can get established again.

During the pandemic we accommodated our tenants where necessary, nursed along many startups, started a boxing gym, funded artists for street art, and generally gave more back to the community than we normally would. There is a stronger sense of community than before.

This article was first published in the BIG ISSUE.