Choosing the best part of Cape Town to live in is easy. You want to be on a wind-sheltered, sun-kissed beachfront, or high on a serene mountain slope commanding mindblowing ocean or valley views. The hard part is having the Table Mountain of cash you need to afford a home in these fabulous neighbourhoods.
Luckily, there are plenty of great and relatively affordable suburbs in Cape Town that aren’t the exclusive playground of tycoons. To choose the right neighbourhood to live in Cape Town, you’ll need to think about your budget, commuting needs and lifestyle priorities.
With that in mind, let’s explore the best burbs of Cape Town ...
Cape Town’s residential districts are spread out over a wide area, with each suburb offering a unique package of advantages and disadvantages. These are the key factors to consider when deciding where to live in the city.
Cape Town has a relatively good public transport system compared to Johannesburg and Durban.
With traffic in Cape Town an increasingly brazen time thief, many savvy commuters are now opting to go back to public transport. Your journey may not always be significantly shorter, but you can read, do some work en route, or just enjoy some much-needed daydreaming time.
Cape Town has many excellent private schools, but several of its public schools rank among the country’s top 21 schools —and can cost you as much as R100 000 less per year in fees than private schools with similar academic and sporting records.
Most of the best-performing English-language high schools, such as Westerford, Rondebosch Boys High, Rustenburg Girls High and SACS, are concentrated in the Claremont-Rondebosch-Newlands belt, which is sometimes dubbed the ‘Golden Mile’ for this reason.
The best Afrikaans-language schools are dotted around the city, including Jan Van Riebeeck in the CBD, DF Malan in Bellville, and Groote Schuur in Newlands. Excellent public junior schools are also all over the peninsula.
The catch with good public schools, quite literally, is that admission often requires the child to be living within their local ‘catchment areas’. This system has been a big factor in driving up property prices and rents in the ‘Golden Mile’ and nearby areas in the Southern Suburbs.
Even so, there are several good public schools outside these sought-after areas. If you have school-going kids, this could influence your home-hunting priorities.
Cape Town is richly endowed with beautiful public parks and spaces—from the vast hiking and climbing paradise of Table Mountain National Park to meandering through Kirstenbosch National Botanical Gardens, Green Point Park, Newlands Forest, and the Cape Point Nature Reserve, Tokai Forest and Silvermine Nature Reserve.
But wait, that’s not all. Many small, peaceful and well-patronised district parks dot the suburbs from Arderne Gardens in Claremont, De Waal Park in Gardens, and Wynberg Park to Nantes Park in Athlone.
And we haven’t even mentioned beaches.
When living in Cape Town, it’s famously easy to take the mountain parks and the sea for granted and not make the most of them in your normal routine, especially for people who have to travel a bit to reach the ‘spine’ of the peninsula.
A communal green space right around the corner from your home will make a big difference to your quality of life, especially if you have kids and/or dogs. Consider this factor when looking at homes.
Traffic congestion in Cape Town is not a joke, as much as visiting Joburgers love to make fun of it. Its residents lose an average of 94 hours a year to traffic, ranking it the seventh most congested city in the world.
If you’re commuting into the city from the suburbs, you will need some good podcasts, preferably about meditation. In the hybrid and remote-working era, traffic is not a huge factor for many people. If you work at the office and are considering a suburb to live in, it’s wise to run the numbers by drawing a triangle or rectangle on the map—connecting your home, workplace, local shopping centre, and possibly your kids’ school. Then do some Google Maps route tests at the various times of day you’ll be moving between those points, and add up the total minutes you drive on a daily basis. Brace yourself, it could be scary.
If your time is very valuable, it may be worth paying a premium to live close to your workplace, otherwise, you’ll need to ensure you’re driving against peak traffic. For example, you’ll need to travel out of major business centres like the City Bowl, Claremont or Belville in the mornings.
There are few suburbs in Cape Town that don’t have a decent local shopping centre nearby. If you want to be close to major supermarkets, gyms or any other big store or service, some parts of the Southern Suburbs and South Peninsula may be less convenient.
Luckily, the number and spread of major retail developments have generally kept pace with residential property development, so it’s hard to find yourself based more than 15 or 20-minute travel from a major mall.
In Cape Town’s property world, money walks—as in, it walks to the beach, mountain, or school. House prices and rents are closely tied to avoiding traffic and the proximity of natural beauty and recreation.
Another thing you pay a premium for is relative shelter from the city’s notorious summer wind, the South-Easter, which torments all the exposed, low-lying suburbs but goes easy on those protected by mountains, especially any neighbourhoods that are perched on or below north- and west-facing slopes. That said, wind and traffic are part of Cape Town life, and many very liveable and reasonably priced suburbs are out there, waiting patiently for your bond payments.
The city’s most affordable areas lie mostly to the east of the Southern Suburbs railway line, and the north and east of the CBD.
Like most major South African cities, Cape Town has areas with higher crime levels, and being safety-conscious is part of everyday life. Taking basic precautions, such as securing your home, being aware of your surroundings, and choosing your routes carefully, goes a long way.
Most incidents occurring in specific areas of the Cape Flats are often linked to deeper socio-economic challenges. In contrast, many suburban and higher-income neighbourhoods are generally safe for walking, especially during the day.
Suburbs alongside the highways or bordering lower-income areas may experience more opportunistic crime, so it's worth asking locals or estate agents about specific safety trends when house-hunting.
No matter where you live, good security systems and community WhatsApp groups are common and effective ways to stay safe and connected.
The city can be divided roughly into six regions, and while house prices and rents do vary within them, you can safely assume that if you’re on a tight budget, you aren’t going to have much joy on the Atlantic Seaboard, the City Bowl, and the western half of the Southern Suburbs. These areas are expensive due to their convenience and gobsmacking landscapes and seascapes—and from the resulting steady flow of investment from wealthy buyers who hail from upcountry and abroad.
The Atlantic-facing coast of the Peninsula is rife with spectacular views and some spectacular property values. According to Property24, the average selling price of Atlantic Seaboard properties is currently approaching R5 million.
The water can feel more Antarctic than Atlantic if you’re brave enough to enter it, unlike the warmer False Bay. On the plus side, the sun lingers above the sparkling horizon till well after 8 pm in midsummer—Sea Point, Camps Bay, Clifton, Bakoven, Bantry Bay, and Llandudno are chronically blessed by world-class sunsets. Traffic can be an issue here, and even when the roads are not congested, you only have three winding routes out of the Atlantic Seaboard suburbs—via Kloofnek, via Sea Point and Green Point, or southward via Chapman’s Peak to Noordhoek Valley in the south.
Apartment blocks in Sea Point and Green Point are the region’s most affordable homes to live in, though neither burb is cheap. Both areas offer easy access to the Sea Point Promenade, a long and sociable waterfront route for walkers, runners and bikers. Older blocks that are equidistant between the mountain and the sea are relatively affordable, as are any flats that lack sea views. And if money is no object, you want to be perched on a beach or the Twelve Apostles.
Way down south on the Atlantic coast lie Hout Bay, Noordhoek and Scarborough, home to a motley mix of hippies, rich folks and nature-loving retirees.
The City Bowl boasts a fairly wide range of home types, from elegant Victorian double-storey houses in Oranjezicht, Tamboerskloof, Vredehoek and Gardens, and contemporary mansions in Higgovale, to tiny studio apartments in the CBD. The City Bowl commands a property premium due to a combination of factors, from strong tourist demand to a growing tribe of forex-flashing digital nomads and an increase in local professionals wanting to live a European-style pedestrian lifestyle.
If you often need to work or socialise in other parts of Cape Town, getting there and back won’t be a breeze. The number of road routes out of the City Bowl is limited by the inconveniently large lumps of rock standing in the way—namely Table Mountain, Devil’s Peak, Lion’s Head and Signal Hill. The trick is to avoid the inward morning traffic and the outward afternoon and evening traffic. (Capetonian office workers are notorious among Joburgers for the cheeky 4 pm knockoff, especially on Fridays.)
In recent years, many buyers have invested in the old and characterful suburbs on the eastern gateway to the City Bowl, namely Woodstock, University Estate and Salt River. The parts of those burbs lying south of Main Rd, on the slope of Devil’s Peak, have gentrified significantly in the last decade or two, but they still offer better prices per square metre than the City Bowl itself.
On the eastern half of greater Cape Town, Cape Flats properties are far more affordable, averaging around R750 000 according to Property24. You’ll pay more than that to buy a house in the safer and more comfortable parts of the Flats, such as Ottery, Athlone, Lansdowne and Parkwood, which border on the Southern Suburbs.
Further east, at the foot of the Boland mountains are the upmarket areas of Somerset West and Gordon’s Bay, where many retirees and new arrivals from upcountry have settled. Reasonably priced townhouse complexes have mushroomed here in recent years, making the area an accessible entry point. These areas appeal to outdoorsy families who don’t need to be close to the urban buzz.
Spanning a huge area, from Maitland just outside the CBD in the west to Kraaifontein in the east, the region is a mix of formerly white working-class neighbourhoods like Brooklyn, Parow and Edgemead — which have all seen gentrification of late — and fancier burbs like Durbanville, Plattekloof and Panorama. Belville is the major business centre, and the entire region offers excellent value for money. There is a wealth of outdoor pursuits here, from an array of wine farms to great hiking trails through nearby hills and mountains. Afrikaans remains the lingua franca, but the North is an increasingly diverse, dynamic and multicultural place—more so than the largely English-speaking Southern Suburbs.
Lining the eastern slopes of Table Mountain and Constantiaberg down to Muizenberg in the south, the Southern Suburbs are the leafiest parts of Cape Town. What they may lack in edgy urban energy, they make up for with mountains, forests, plentiful good state and private schools, the University of Cape Town’s campus, and (if you both work and live there) a healthy work-life balance. Home to a growing number of finance, property and IT startups, the Claremont-Newlands-Rondebosch area offers professionals an upmarket but more peaceful answer to the City Bowl’s bustling workplace environment.
And if those core neighbourhoods are too swanky for your home budget, explore the surrounding suburbs. Rosebank, Mowbray, Little Mowbray, Observatory and Pinelands are in the north. There is still a lot of upside potential and affordability in quiet neighbourhoods like Kenilworth, Plumstead, Harfield Village, Diep River, Meadowridge and Bergvliet in the south.
The posh ‘mink and manure’ suburb of Constantia, at the foot of Constantiaberg mountain, offers views, large houses, horsey pastimes, historic wine farms and a semirural atmosphere, but at a racy price.
And down south are the False Bay suburbs of Lakeside, Muizenberg, Steenberg, St James, Kalk Bay, Fish Hoek and Simonstown—all offering wonderful lifestyles, with tidal pools and picturesque old houses. Prices vary wildly though. Kalk Bay is now fancy, while Muizenberg is much cheaper. The sun sets early in winter down south and as a result, your home will be chillier and damper.
Much of the north coast of Cape Town is newly developed and offers good value for money and liveability in suburbs like upmarket Parklands, Bloubergstrand, Table View and Melkbosstrand. The beaches are superb, the Table Mountain views are unforgettable, and residents are an easy drive away from weekend getaway paradises like the lagoon village of Langebaan or the spectacular Cederberg mountains.
The catch is some fairly grisly traffic congestion at peak hours, so think carefully about house-hunting in the area if you need to commute to town or further south every day. The entire coast is well covered by MyCiti bus routes, with dedicated lanes in congested areas, but even so, the north coast is probably the best bet for remote workers or anyone who doesn’t feel the need to go about town.
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