Stephen Jennings: belief

Transcript context

…Give us a sense of the range of price points. Say someone wants to live here. What does it cost? People envisage these projects as being like gated communities for the elite, and that is one model. But if you think what a city really is, that is not a city. A key dimension of building a city that’s efficient and as agglomeration economies is mixed use, mixed income. You can’t just pay lip service to that to make NGOs happen. It’s actually in our interest to do that. For housing, we go down to about $30,000 for what is really a world-class product produced by Unity Homes. In terms of the finish, the environmental amenities, securities, pools, bars, these really are world-class units. Equally, we want the owners of major businesses and the biggest entrepreneurs in the region to come and live at Tatu City. We might have a product where just your land is going to cost you $1,000,000 before you build your house. It’ll be extremely beautiful, it’ll have amazing amenities, and you’ll be in the heart of the project. We do and we have to accommodate for that full range, and not just in housing: things like restaurants and services, nail salons. You can make it just for the elite in a shopping mall, or you’re going to have a variety of formats where you accommodate everybody. We go out of our way, and it’s very unusual how we think about that. We want the worker who’s earning $250 a month to do some of his shopping, to have a restaurant that is affordable for him. We make a big effort to provide those services for those people. Let’s say either you or someone else wants to do a version of the idea, but with a price point at $10,000. What problem needs to be solved, or what problems, for that to be possible?…

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