Abu Dhabi - first impressions
4 Comments Published by Tom Gara on Monday, February 18 at Monday, February 18, 2008.
On the occasion of my two-week anniversary in Abu Dhabi, here's some thoughts on my new home. It's still early days, so all my idea's and perceptions of Abu Dhabi might turn out to be completely off the mark. But that's the beauty about blogging. A few months ago, on celebrating the third anniversary of being in Cairo, I went back and looked at what I wrote in those first few months. Some of its was laughably wrong, the kind of stuff written by the greenest of Cairo newbies. Some of it was still as true in my heart three years on as it was the day I wrote it.
In that spirit, I'm going to make some pretty uninformed, totally anecdotally-based, potentially-embarrassingly-wrong generalisations about Abu Dhabi, as much for my own future entertainment as anything else. Is that enough of a disclaimer?
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First up, if there is some kind of boutique financial instrument - a bespoke hedging contract or similarly custom-made bit of financial trickery - that lets you make cash out of the differential between Abu Dhabi's unbelievably high housing prices and ludicrously cheap general cost of living levels, then invest in it today.
Apartment prices are at inner city London / Manhattan levels: Consider yourself lucky to find a one bedroom apartment for less than $2000 per month, $3000 is certainly not out of the question. Double it for a two bedroom, and so on... And that is if you can even find a place at all - plenty of people sped a couple of months just finding somewhere that is available.
At the same time, the cost of living is crazily, almost unfairly cheap. Taxis are at Cairo prices: $1 for a quick 5-10 minute ride, $3 will get you pretty much anywhere in town. This is in a nice shiny new car, and metered. It feels almost like you are ripping the guy off when you pay the fare, and I have no idea of how the economics of this can work. Cairo cabbies drive dying 1970's wrecks , charge the same if not more, and seem to reside right on the poverty line. How do they make it work here?
Food is also just comically cheap: A plate of masala chicken with paratha bread etc at an Indian restaurant for "workers" would set you back $2-3 (and its absolutely delicious). A great meal at a slightly more polished Indian/Lebanese/Egyptian place frequented by middle class working families would come out to $5-10. It's only at the upper end places within five-star hotels that I have seen a main course priced at over $20.
How does this work? No idea. But it seems inevitable that there will be some sort of convergence between sky-high housing prices and bargain-basement living costs. The UAE's currency is pegged to the freefalling US dollar, meaning that every time the dollar devalues, the cost of imports goes up. So there is pretty serious inflation right now, and it will not remain a major issue (probably THE issue) here for years to come. Huge construction projects are in full swing - they don't do buildings here, they do new cities and new islands - so maybe that will bring property prices down, although with 25,000 people reportedly moving here every month, I doubt it.
Point being, if you can find a way to bet on the gap between housing prices and cost of living narrowing, take it - you'll become millionaire.
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The are so many big-name developments going on here that it is hard to keep track, and even harder to visualise them all becoming a reality in the next five years. There's Saadiyat Island, the cultural hub that will house the world's largest (of course) Guggenheim museum (designed in typically surreal fashion by Frank Gehry), a branch of the Louvre, an absolutely stunning looking performing arts centre (if its looks half as good as the designs, it will be right up there with the Sydney Opera House, etc) and a overseas campus of New York University.
Then there's Yas Island, which will be home to a Formula One grand prix, which will apparently have its first F1 GP in 2009. Yas will also be home to a Ferrari museum/motorsport themepark where, please please please let this be true, the "rides" will include a racetrack where you can hire a supercar (Ferrari Enzo, please) for a few thrashes round the track. It will be the first theme park that I will have ever had any interest in visiting....
More interestingly, there is Masdar City, which will be the world's first zero-emmissions city. No cars, all sustainable systems for energy, waste etc, and home to 20,000 people. Will they be able to pull it off, especially in this part of the world where summers require constant air conditioning? And where else in the world would a groundbreaking experiment in sustainability exist side-by-side with a motorsport themepark?
------
When you look at Abu Dhabi today, you see a very different city to the one that will exist if all these projects are pulled off. It's clean, modern and things seem to work. Traffic cruises along smoothly thanks to pretty much every single road in the city being eight lanes wide.
On the ground level, things are still in that sort of transitory period between developing and developed. Aside from the shopping malls, stores are still of the small, owner-operated variety, little dry cleaning shops, mobile phone stores, tailors and bakeries. The mass-scale consolidation and franchise-centric ways of Western cities hasn't yet decimated local commerce the way it has in Adelaide or Dublin.
Like many cities that were planned and built en-masse rather than grown organically, there is no center, no hive of activity that bustles with people walking from place to place. It is lots of eight-lane roads lined with 20-storey high buildings that have little shops on the ground level, interspersed with the occasional shopping mall that is everything you imagine a sparkly new mall in the Gulf to be.
-------
Abu Dhabi is not stunning in its epic'ness like Cairo, gorgeously refined like Amsterdam or dazzlingly glittery like Dubai. But what is has, which none of these other cities do, is the likelihood that it will become something far bigger, more important and interesting and truly different, than what it is today.
Some cities have reached their prime, and are now basking in the long, pleasant sunset of their greatness. Some are so perpetually in decline and renewal, so eternal in their harnessing and squandering of massed human energy that they will never truly change. Some have boomed, discovering their trajectory and sharing it so clearly with the world that their future is likely to be a continuous, incremental improvement on the present. It's is a blessing that I have experienced, and will continue to experience, all three.
What I have never been part of is a city that is squarely in the middle of transformation from one to a very different other. Living in Abu Dhabi for the next few years will be much like watching one of those time-lapse videos of an building being built or a seed turning into a flower, except the scale will be so much larger, and the end result unlike anything else in the world. I count myself very lucky to have the privilege of watching it all happen right in front of my eyes.
In that spirit, I'm going to make some pretty uninformed, totally anecdotally-based, potentially-embarrassingly-wrong generalisations about Abu Dhabi, as much for my own future entertainment as anything else. Is that enough of a disclaimer?
-------------
First up, if there is some kind of boutique financial instrument - a bespoke hedging contract or similarly custom-made bit of financial trickery - that lets you make cash out of the differential between Abu Dhabi's unbelievably high housing prices and ludicrously cheap general cost of living levels, then invest in it today.
Apartment prices are at inner city London / Manhattan levels: Consider yourself lucky to find a one bedroom apartment for less than $2000 per month, $3000 is certainly not out of the question. Double it for a two bedroom, and so on... And that is if you can even find a place at all - plenty of people sped a couple of months just finding somewhere that is available.
At the same time, the cost of living is crazily, almost unfairly cheap. Taxis are at Cairo prices: $1 for a quick 5-10 minute ride, $3 will get you pretty much anywhere in town. This is in a nice shiny new car, and metered. It feels almost like you are ripping the guy off when you pay the fare, and I have no idea of how the economics of this can work. Cairo cabbies drive dying 1970's wrecks , charge the same if not more, and seem to reside right on the poverty line. How do they make it work here?
Food is also just comically cheap: A plate of masala chicken with paratha bread etc at an Indian restaurant for "workers" would set you back $2-3 (and its absolutely delicious). A great meal at a slightly more polished Indian/Lebanese/Egyptian place frequented by middle class working families would come out to $5-10. It's only at the upper end places within five-star hotels that I have seen a main course priced at over $20.
How does this work? No idea. But it seems inevitable that there will be some sort of convergence between sky-high housing prices and bargain-basement living costs. The UAE's currency is pegged to the freefalling US dollar, meaning that every time the dollar devalues, the cost of imports goes up. So there is pretty serious inflation right now, and it will not remain a major issue (probably THE issue) here for years to come. Huge construction projects are in full swing - they don't do buildings here, they do new cities and new islands - so maybe that will bring property prices down, although with 25,000 people reportedly moving here every month, I doubt it.
Point being, if you can find a way to bet on the gap between housing prices and cost of living narrowing, take it - you'll become millionaire.
--------
The are so many big-name developments going on here that it is hard to keep track, and even harder to visualise them all becoming a reality in the next five years. There's Saadiyat Island, the cultural hub that will house the world's largest (of course) Guggenheim museum (designed in typically surreal fashion by Frank Gehry), a branch of the Louvre, an absolutely stunning looking performing arts centre (if its looks half as good as the designs, it will be right up there with the Sydney Opera House, etc) and a overseas campus of New York University.
Then there's Yas Island, which will be home to a Formula One grand prix, which will apparently have its first F1 GP in 2009. Yas will also be home to a Ferrari museum/motorsport themepark where, please please please let this be true, the "rides" will include a racetrack where you can hire a supercar (Ferrari Enzo, please) for a few thrashes round the track. It will be the first theme park that I will have ever had any interest in visiting....
More interestingly, there is Masdar City, which will be the world's first zero-emmissions city. No cars, all sustainable systems for energy, waste etc, and home to 20,000 people. Will they be able to pull it off, especially in this part of the world where summers require constant air conditioning? And where else in the world would a groundbreaking experiment in sustainability exist side-by-side with a motorsport themepark?
------
When you look at Abu Dhabi today, you see a very different city to the one that will exist if all these projects are pulled off. It's clean, modern and things seem to work. Traffic cruises along smoothly thanks to pretty much every single road in the city being eight lanes wide.
On the ground level, things are still in that sort of transitory period between developing and developed. Aside from the shopping malls, stores are still of the small, owner-operated variety, little dry cleaning shops, mobile phone stores, tailors and bakeries. The mass-scale consolidation and franchise-centric ways of Western cities hasn't yet decimated local commerce the way it has in Adelaide or Dublin.
Like many cities that were planned and built en-masse rather than grown organically, there is no center, no hive of activity that bustles with people walking from place to place. It is lots of eight-lane roads lined with 20-storey high buildings that have little shops on the ground level, interspersed with the occasional shopping mall that is everything you imagine a sparkly new mall in the Gulf to be.
-------
Abu Dhabi is not stunning in its epic'ness like Cairo, gorgeously refined like Amsterdam or dazzlingly glittery like Dubai. But what is has, which none of these other cities do, is the likelihood that it will become something far bigger, more important and interesting and truly different, than what it is today.
Some cities have reached their prime, and are now basking in the long, pleasant sunset of their greatness. Some are so perpetually in decline and renewal, so eternal in their harnessing and squandering of massed human energy that they will never truly change. Some have boomed, discovering their trajectory and sharing it so clearly with the world that their future is likely to be a continuous, incremental improvement on the present. It's is a blessing that I have experienced, and will continue to experience, all three.
What I have never been part of is a city that is squarely in the middle of transformation from one to a very different other. Living in Abu Dhabi for the next few years will be much like watching one of those time-lapse videos of an building being built or a seed turning into a flower, except the scale will be so much larger, and the end result unlike anything else in the world. I count myself very lucky to have the privilege of watching it all happen right in front of my eyes.
nice post, keep em coming
Will read your future blogs with great interest - still trying to decide whether Abu Dhabi is right for me and the family!
Tom, as usually great writing - no wonder you are where you are, doing the job you like - luck not too many people get :)
Glad I stumbled across your blog - so well written. My partner and I are moving there on Wednesday and also feel very lucky to have the opportunity to live in such a unique place undergoing so many rapid and fascinating changes.
Best of luck in AD