Dubious About Dubai

Burj Khalifa

So we’re in the midst of one of the worst economic crisis in modern history and Dubai launches the glitzy Burj Khalifa, “the world’s tallest building”. Only in Dubai. But then again the emirate never made any sense to me, especially after I visited the place for the first time a couple of years ago on a business trip.

A few things stand out in my mind about that trip:

After a meeting on the second day of my stay, our business partner — an affable, Western-educated Iranian living in Dubai named Tom — was driving me back to my hotel. After a while on the highway he slowed down, rolled to the side of the road and pointed to our left.

“There’s your hotel, just across the way. If you walk across the highway, you’ll get there in five minutes. If I drive you over there from here, believe it or not, it’ll take twenty minutes or more. So do you mind if I let you off here and have you walk to the hotel? I’m really sorry about that, but I’m running late for my next meeting.”

I told him not to worry, but was completely taken aback. The hotel was right there, just 110 meters or so to our immediate left across the highway. Why would it take twenty minutes to drive there? As I stepped out of the car in my suit and tie, the mid-August Dubai heat bore down on me; the car radio had said that temperatures reached 50 degrees Celsius in open areas that day. Fortunately, as Tom said, it only took me a few minutes to get to the hotel after weaving through light traffic on the highway, but I was still drenched with sweat by the time I reached the front door.

The next morning while in his car again Tom explained: “Hey, I’m really sorry about yesterday. But as I told you, it would’ve taken a LOT longer to drive you to the hotel from where we were. Know why? Because they threw up all these roads and highways here but didn’t plan very well for simple things like off-ramps! We end up wasting a lot of time just driving around as a result. It’s frustrating as hell.”

He was working himself up. “That’s how Dubai is. They always do things without thinking through the details. Like, there’s this brand new five-star apartment right next to where I live. The place looks really sleek and modern, so you’d think everything in that building works perfectly, right? But noooo….Every morning residents there have to wait in line for up to fifteen minutes for the elevators. Fifteen minutes! They spent millions building this luxury housing complex and didn’t think about how many elevators they really needed in there. It’s crazy! They just throw money at things and think that’s enough.”

If this place ever crashes, I thought, maybe Tom will be one of the first to get out of town!

Something else that was curious during my trip was how we’d sometimes have to arrive ridiculously early for meetings. For example, if our meeting with a prospect was at 10:00 a.m., we’d try to get to the vicinity of the prospect’s office by around 9:15 a.m. The reason was because in many parts of Dubai, finding a parking place is really difficult. Typically, we’d arrive at a place and find that all available parking spaces were completely occupied, and would have to drive around and around waiting for a space to open up, which could take up to half an hour — another huge time-waster (and very environmentally-unfriendly) caused by poor planning.

The Burj Khalifa is just the latest example of that Dubai mindset and way of doing things.

Other anomalies in Dubai include: the population consists of 80% foreigners, the majority of whom are just living in Dubai temporarily; there’s a clash between the “decadent” lifestyle of expat Westerners and that of the local Muslim community; the male-to-female ratio is three-to-one; Dubai is basically a huge theme park with very little industry, culture and history; the emirate is ruled according to the whims of one man, Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, etc. All of this plus my experiences there made me wonder who would want to buy up all that luxury property that was being built and how sustainable Dubai’s development model was.

Now we know.

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