Is Egypt Serious About Building a Brand New Capital City?

It’s creative. Got to give the Egyptians that much. With an economy still mired in the dumps, President Abdel-Fattah el Sissi has ordered up a brand new mega-project - build a new eco-friendly city the size of Singapore in the desert outside of Cairo.

This new “Capital Cairo” intends to be everything Egypt today is not. Two thousand effective schools, diverse neighborhoods, shopping malls, efficient mass transportation, skyscrapers, affordable housing for 7 million, one million new jobs, a park twice the size of New York City’s Central Park, and a passel of solar energy farms to run everything. Cost? A paltry $80 billion.

Though project planners describe it as a “dream of what could become reality,” others are groaning and slapping their collective head at what seems to have the high potential to become another financial boondoggle. A few obvious questions leap to mind. Who’s going to build the infrastructure? Are there anywhere near 7 million people ready to move into the new units? And talking diversity is easier than actually coaxing different ethnic groups to plop down their money and move into a neighborhood full of people who look and act differently.

Sure, Dubai has been known to build flashy, palm tree-shaped islands from scratch in the middle of the ocean, but Egypt does not have the resources.

For decades, and with a long string of failures to date, a succession of Egyptian leaders have tried to build desert towns in order to more evenly spread the population. The problem has always been high prices, a lack of jobs, and disappointing infrastructure, resulting in empty housing units and another busted plan.

“Capital Cairo” was presented at a recent economic conference hosted by the resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh. The scale model of the proposed city was a popular draw, with private and government sources committing $36 billion in investment promises. What!? Do they all have brain damage?

Maybe not. This time around there is going to be a profit incentive, a factor severely absent from previous governmental attempts to build a city in the middle of the desert. Though the new project will be overseen by the Housing Ministry, the driving force behind it is Mohamed Alabbarr, the Emirati real estate developer responsible for large-scale projects like the Burj Khalifa skyscraper and much of downtown Dubai.

Will this massive development project succeed where so many others have failed? Who knows, but there is at least one lesson to be learned. Money and real estate are always drawn together. It seems to be an immutable law of the universe, which makes us wonder, where are you putting your money these days? Maybe not Egypt, but single-family residential units in areas in the United States that keep churning out profits doesn’t sound like a bad way to go. (Image: Flickr | 16:9clue)

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