Sandton could become the CBD that inner-city Johannesburg once was — or wishes it could be.
While it has much better infrastructure than downtown, Sandton has been something of a migrant labour area for more than 26 years.
People who work in Sandton often can’t afford to live there too. They drive in and out Monday to Friday and then, over the weekend, it becomes a ghost town.
Aside from people visiting Sandton City and a few hotels, the most valuable commercial node in Africa — which boasts properties such as the Leonardo, which is the tallest building in Africa, and Discovery’s multibillion-rand head office — is dead on Saturdays and Sundays.
But this is changing as the demographics of working people change in Gauteng.
People who went to university in the early 2000s are now bankers and lawyers, engineers and bean counters. They don’t want to drive for 45 minutes to an hour to get to Investec in Sandton for work. They’d rather take a two-minute Uber ride like they do in established CBDs in London or Paris. Some are even able to work from home but they still want to be able to walk to Sandton City.
Property developers are heeding their call. A slew of companies are converting empty Sandton offices into apartments as they try to attract the growing black middle- and upper-class.
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