Kenya's middle-class home-buying boom
Fragile optimism permeates group that's neither desperately poor nor rich
John Nyaga and his daughters Mary Joy, 6, and Catherine, 2, at their new home
in the bustling suburban town of Ngong on the outskirts of Nairobi.
Stephanie Mccrummen / The Washington Post
By Stephanie McCrummen
Updated: 1:51 a.m. ET June 19, 2007
NAIROBI - One recent Sunday, Paul Abeno, a mid-level computer sales executive,
shuffled through aisles of brass cabinet pulls, colored tiles and tiny
glass-encased models of three-bedroom homes landscaped with paper trees. He
stared through the glass at Baobab Village .
"Too late," he said to himself, noting the sold-out sign. But there were other
offerings at the third annual home expo here, and he wandered over to Acacia
Court , Simba Villas and Green Park , three of the many new developments along
the Kenyan capital's edges.
"I was told all these are bought and everyone's moved in," Abeno said, looking
down at the red roofs. "I've just come to see what's on offer so in the near
future I can get one for myself."
Traipsing through the Nairobi Exhibition and Convention Center on this weekend
were small-business owners, teachers, civil servants, farmers, recent college
graduates and others, who make up a group of Kenyans often invisible to the
outside world: neither desperately poor nor outlandishly rich but someplace in
between.
On a continent where people are often trying to escape or simply survive, here
were people perusing six-burner stoves who said they wished to stay, aspiring
homeowners who have been fueling what amounts to a construction boom in this
east African city of skyscrapers and rusted slums; leafy, moneyed
neighborhoods; and lately, it seems, a thousand half-built cinder-block
condominiums with pools, gyms and broadband Internet.
Although the Kenyan economy is growing at 6 percent a year, economists are
uncertain whether the proliferation of new housing and accompanying mortgages
reflects a growing middle class or simply a more prosperous one.
Fragile optimism
The dominant economic picture of the country, they say, is one of entrenched
inequality, with the number of people slipping into poverty increasing and the
gap between rich and poor widening.
But that statistical picture does not account for the sense of fragile optimism
along the aisles at the convention center on a Sunday or, for that matter,
around a city where billboards advertising mortgages promise "a new lifestyle"
with images of a well-dressed man walking across a sun-splattered lawn.
"Looking at these houses, you see a whole life," said Nicholas Kinoti, a
clothing designer with his own shop, which caters to a wealthy clientele. "I
thought instead of paying rent, I could adjust and pay a mortgage."
He was among dozens swarming the booth for a new development of Kansas-made
prefabricated houses called Green Park , whose managing director is a former
aid worker who once dealt with the Ethiopian famine.
Kinoti counts himself among a relatively small but notable group of Kenyans who
have climbed their way into a kind of life their parents barely imagined. His
mother and father were subsistence farmers and managed to send their son to a
university in Nairobi . He got a job with a travel agency afterward and, with
help from brochures of Paris and heavy doses of television, developed a taste
for fashion and an urban lifestyle.
Aided by wife's income as a secretary and with his business doing well, Kinoti
was able to get a mortgage. He has a car and the money to eat aged Gouda
crostini once in a while at Mercury, a swanky restaurant that wouldn't be out
of place in New York, were it not housed in a strip mall.
But Nairobi is a city where people's ambition and energy often surpass their
environment. Women in high heels and suits weave past others in sarongs and
flip-flops along the city's pounded-dirt sidewalks. Men push heavy wooden carts
along streets increasingly crowded with Mitsubishis and Toyotas.
So it was perhaps not surprising, said Patrick Wamayu, a mortgage officer with
Barclays Bank, that when banks began offering mortgages to wider swaths of the
public, they got a flood of customers with modest-paying jobs and hopeful
enough visions of the future to tie themselves to a 20-year mortgage.
Until recently, such loans were available to only the very rich and came with
interest rates around 30 percent. But a shift began as Kenya's financial laws
changed, requiring banks to have less cash in reserve. Lower interest rates on
treasury bonds also encouraged banks to find other ways to invest money.
These days, Barclays offers interest rates around 13 percent and is opening six
new branches in Kenya .
One of those is about 30 minutes beyond downtown Nairobi , along a potholed
road with occasional signs that scream "Buying and selling!" and "Endya Flats!
Master ensuite!" The road leads to a bustling suburban town at the foot of the
cool and rolling Ngong Hills, made famous in the book "Out of Africa" as the
locale of Karen Blixen's coffee plantation.
Besides the bank, Ngong Town is all cyber cafes, hardware stores and lumber
yards these days, a sign of the furious construction along the dirt roads that
twist through the surrounding hills. The area is home to many of Kenya 's
famous athletes and a growing number of less-wealthy strivers buying up new
houses, whose red roofs make a random pattern from a distance, unlike the
uniform rows of many U.S. suburbs.
John Nyaga moved with his wife and two daughters into his new house there eight
months ago. It is one story of cinder blocks with turquoise trim, three small
bedrooms and flowering pink bougainvillea wrapped around a fence.
In the living room, he has a Sanyo flat-screen television and shelves lined
with motivational books such as "Think Big" and "The 7 Habits of Highly
Effective People."
"I like the books that tell me I can use my mind to change things," said Nyaga,
who is 33 and works as a computer programmer.
His father was a farmer with eight wives, and Nyaga grew up the youngest of
more than 60 children. He and his siblings lived with his mother in a
wood-frame, mud-walled house without electricity. Taking the donkey to fetch
water as a boy, Nyaga envisioned a future as a farmer.
But when he reached high school, he began visiting an older sister, who had
become financially successful working for a Kenyan bank. She had a house with
electricity and a television, and her children attended private school.
"I remember you could study at any time there," Nyaga said, explaining that at
home he planned his studies around the availability of a lantern. The visits
"made me view things differently," he said, "because I could see both sides now
and after school, I thought I should live an urban lifestyle."
Big dreams
With his sister's help, Nyaga attended a university, and he eventually got a
job that earns him enough to pay the equivalent of a $100-a-month mortgage and
still tuck away another $30 or so in savings each month. He recently sold his
car to make the down payment on his house and now commutes to Nairobi via
matatu, a type of wild minivan taxi that is the city's public transport.
Nyaga can name 10 friends who have also gotten mortgages, he said, including
colleagues at work and others with jobs at the power company. "My expectation
is that the economy will still rise," Nyaga said.
At the same time, he nonchalantly mentions hard facts of Kenyan life,
statistics that inform the bleaker predictions of think tanks but that he
simply factors into a life he is determined to make better.
"Now, you have to be very fast in making decisions," he said. "Prices are
rising, and the average life span is down. Now it is around 49. So in 10 years'
time, I would like to have finished my mortgage and maybe go into my own
business after that."
"I don't believe in stopping at one point -- I will move to Lavington," he
added, invoking the wealthy Nairobi neighborhood of sprawling lawns and
gardens. "I wouldn't mind that."
Researcher Charles Wachira contributed to this report.
© 2007 The Washington Post Company
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