Kunstler: Side Trip

…After apartheid fell, white business fled the large central business district of Joburg for the northern suburbs, establishing an alternative universe of drive-in offices, malls, and gated housing “estates” (what we call tract housing). Meanwhile, the skyscraper district — about the size of Denver’s — was abandoned for a while. Squatters moved into forty story towers, even after the elevators stopped working. Other buildings were just stripped of valuables like copper wire and fixtures. Now the downtown has been officially reinhabited and many of the former office towers have been refitted for apartments. But the elevators are still often broken and in 2007 a series of rolling electric blackouts made life miserable there. I had to wonder what the future of that place was, given how much it costs to really maintain a skyscraper over the long haul. My guess is that the decay must necessarily outpace the attempts at upkeep when these places are owned, in essence, by slumlords.


… On the whole, you got the feeling that all the multicolored upper crusts of South Africa were largely tuned-out to some larger forces gathering to shake up their world — in particular the energy crisis that has moved off center-stage temporarily while banks and national economies flounder everywhere. The energy crisis will return. South Africa has coal and nuclear power, but not enough generating capacity to stay very far ahead of an ongoing shortage of electric power. They have a pretty robust coal-to-liquids program for helping to fuel all the cars — but they also import a lot of regular oil and are at the mercy of oil states elsewhere in Africa who resent them. The white majority seems to ignore the fact that their future hangs by the rather flimsy threads that hold together the combined motoring-and-security systems that protect them. The story there is hardly over.

Kunstler.com