In Cape Town’s historic Bo-Kaap, homes under siege from rich foreign buyers

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Cape Town, South Africa – Just after sunrise, the call to prayer drifts across a community at the foot of Cape Town’s Table Mountain.

From the minaret of the Auwal Masjid – South Africa’s oldest mosque, built in 1794 – the adhan echoes through the narrow streets and brightly coloured houses of Bo-Kaap, a historically Muslim community.

Heritage under siege

For local photographer Yasser Booley, the change has been gradual, but impossible to ignore.

“The biggest changes I have seen are the slow choking of my living culture through the accelerated sale of homes to high net worth individuals, the majority of whom have no connection to the place or the culture,” he says.

Booley, 50, an eighth-generation Bo-Kaap resident, grew up in a neighbourhood where extended families often lived within a few streets of one another – bound by mosques, schools, and a shared history shaped by culture, colonial rule, and apartheid.

Today, Booley says, that social fabric is under strain, as the neighbourhood’s growing popularity with tourists and investors begins to reshape everyday life – from the kinds of businesses opening in the area, to how homes are used.

For him, the changes are not only visible in who lives in the neighbourhood, but in how Bo-Kaap itself is being viewed from the outside.

Across Cape Town’s prime property market, international demand has become increasingly visible. Data from the Seeff Property Group shows foreign buyers accounted for about 2.8 billion rand ($168m) – roughly a quarter of the 11.3 billion rand ($679m) in property sales across the Atlantic Seaboard and City Bowl in the past year.

And as demand from wealthy buyers grows, residents say the consequences are unfolding inside the neighbourhood itself.

Homes that once housed generations of the same families are increasingly sold to foreign investors or converted into short-term rentals like Airbnb.

Younger residents, meanwhile, are finding it even harder to remain in the neighbourhood their families have called home for decades – some, for centuries.

“I have seen my generation leave the Bo-Kaap en masse because they can’t afford to live here anymore,” Booley says. “Where young people do happen to have the resources to buy in the area, there seems to be an invisible barrier [to entry].”

For Booley, this raises a deeper question: whether the community that built Bo-Kaap can still afford to stay here.

“It is, culturally speaking, a dire state of aﬀairs when the hard-fought battles of our ancestors come to nought, ” he says.

Tourism boom or housing squeeze?

In recent years, Cape Town’s rise as a global tourism destination has quietly transformed the economics of its inner-city housing market.

In 2025 alone, the city welcomed about 3.3 million international travellers, according to Airports Company South Africa.

For travellers, neighbourhoods clustered around the City Bowl, such as Bo-Kaap, have become central to that tourism economy, offering something increasingly rare in global cities: a historic district where culture, architecture and daily life still coexist.

But those same qualities have made the area prime real estate.

Short-term rental platforms have accelerated that shift.

Data from rental analytics firm AirDNA shows more than 31,000 active short-term rental listings operating across Cape Town, with some of the highest concentrations around the central business district – 26,000 Airbnb listings alone.

For property owners, the returns can be considerable. According to AirDNA, some short-term rentals in central Cape Town generate more than 400,000 rand ($24,000) a year – often far outpacing what traditional long-term rentals can bring in.

By comparison, a similar apartment rented long-term to a local tenant typically earns between 12,000 and 18,000 rand ($720 – $1,080) a month – or about 144,000 to 216,000 rand ($8,640 – $13,000) a year.

But tourism is only one part of the story.

Cape Town has also become a magnet for remote workers and digital nomads – professionals earning salaries in stronger foreign currencies while living in South Africa.

In 2024, the government introduced a digital nomad visa allowing foreign remote workers employed abroad to live in South Africa for extended periods – as part of a push to attract international talent, tourism and investment.

Drawn by the city’s climate, scenery, and relatively lower cost of living, many can afford rents far beyond what most local residents earn.

“Remote workers and international buyers have put aﬀordability beyond the means of locals,” argues Booley.

The gap between local incomes and housing costs is stark.

According to South Africa’s Quarterly Labour Force Survey, the median monthly salary in South Africa is estimated to be roughly 15,000 to 18,000 rand (about $800 to $950).

By contrast, long-term rentals in central Cape Town frequently exceed 20,000 rand ($1,200) per month, with some properties commanding significantly higher prices during peak tourist seasons.

Cape Town-based housing advocacy organisation Ndifuna Ukwazi says many low- and middle-income workers are increasingly being priced out of the inner city, despite holding full-time jobs.

The widening gap between wages and housing costs, it warns, is contributing to a growing class of the so-called “working homeless”- people who are employed but still unable to secure stable housing.

For the Bo-Kaap Civic and Ratepayers Association (BKCRA), a community organisation representing residents and property owners in the historic neighbourhood, the effects of the property boom are no longer theoretical. They are unfolding house by house, street by street.

“The community absolutely views the current situation as a form of economic displacement,” says Sheikh Dawood Terblanche, chairperson of the BKCRA.

He says while residents are not being forcibly removed by law, a quieter form of displacement is under way – driven by rising property prices, escalating municipal rates and the broader cost of living.

And the fears are not new.

In 2019, thousands of residents took to the streets of Bo-Kaap to protest against large-scale property developments they believed threatened the historic neighbourhood. The demonstrations drew national attention and eventually led to the area being granted a Heritage Protection Overlay Zone (HPOZ) status – designed to protect its distinctive architecture and streetscape.

But while the heritage designation helped shield the neighbourhood’s colourful houses from demolition, locals say it does little to protect the people who live inside them.

Instead, residents say the effects are increasingly felt right at their front doors.

“The pressure is intense and constant,” Terblanche says.

“Residents report being frequently approached by agents with high-cash offers, often targeted at elderly homeowners and the vulnerable.”

The cost of staying

For some residents, the pressure does not come only from investors; it comes from the rising cost of remaining in the neighbourhood.

As property prices across Cape Town’s inner city have climbed over the past two decades, municipal valuations have risen alongside them. Higher valuations translate directly into higher property rates – turning once-modest family homes into expensive assets.

Across Cape Town, property values have risen by an average of about 10 percent a year, consistently outperforming other major metros, including the country’s economic hub, Johannesburg.

In some areas, the increases have been far steeper: property prices have climbed by more than 200 percent over the past decade, while municipal rates and charges have surged by nearly 500 percent.

For older residents in Bo-Kaap, the consequences can be particularly severe.

“For pensioners on fixed incomes, the resulting property rates are often higher than their monthly pensions. Many are forced to sell simply because they can no longer afford the ‘tax of living’ in their ancestral homes,” Terblanche says. South Africa’s state old-age pension is about 2,190 rand ($115) a month, paid through the South African Social Security Agency – leaving little room for homeowners facing rising municipal property rates.

For younger generations, the barrier is different: entry.

Property prices in Bo-Kaap have risen sharply over the past decade, as investor demand and tourism have driven up property values across the inner city.

One-bedroom entry-level homes now regularly sell for between 2.5 million and 3 million rand – roughly $135,000 to $160,000 – placing ownership far beyond the reach of many families whose roots in the area stretch back generations. Less than a decade ago, similar homes sold for about 1.6 million rand (around $100,000).

Across Cape Town more broadly, the affordability gap has widened dramatically. Research estimates that more than 90 percent of households cannot afford property in the City Bowl, where housing prices have risen far faster than wages.

The City’s position

But City of Cape Town officials say the pressures affecting neighbourhoods like Bo-Kaap must be understood within the broader transformation of the city.

In a written response, City spokesperson Luthando Tyhalibongo said Cape Town’s rapid growth is a major factor shaping its housing market.

“The success of Cape Town as a city has seen a population growth of almost a million new residents from semigration and other forces of urbanisation over the past decade alone,” he said, referring to the trend of South Africans internally migrating to better-run municipalities in the country.

He said housing affordability is also shaped by wider economic conditions.

“There is an income crisis in South Africa … The lack of economic [opportunities] continues to have a profound impact on income levels and affordability for most households.”

Tyhalibongo said the City is also trying to address the spatial legacy of apartheid-era urban planning, which left many lower-income households living far from economic centres. Some families on the urban periphery still spend about 40 percent of their income on transport just to reach work.

The City says it is attempting to expand housing supply – in a bid to promote accessibility to economic opportunities. “In the past two years, we’ve released more land for affordable housing than in the last 10 years,” it said.

The national government, meanwhile, says policies aimed at attracting digital nomads and foreign investment are designed to boost tourism, spending and economic growth.

In Bo-Kaap, however, residents say the challenge is not proximity to opportunity, but the growing cost of remaining in the neighbourhood itself.

What remains

As demand for prime inner-city property continues to grow, residents say heritage protection has exposed a deeper tension in Bo-Kaap.

“The living heritage, its people are not protected,” Terblanche says.

The houses of Bo-Kaap remain – a cascade of colour climbing the slopes beneath Table Mountain – just as they have for generations.

Five times a day, the call to prayer still rises from the minaret of the Auwal Masjid, marking the passage of time in a neighbourhood that has changed around it.

But for Booley, what is disappearing is far harder to preserve.

“The existential loss of the physical environment responsible for the passing on and the survival of a unique culture formed in the shadow of Table Mountain,” he says.

Then, he pauses.

“The reality is already here – the culture is under assault.”

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