Media release
5 March 2020
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The City of Cape Town invited comment regarding the renewal of a lease of almost 46 hectares of publically owned land to the Rondebosch gold club. The deadline for comments is 9 March 2020 and the public may email comments to Magda Murray at magda.murray@capetown.gov.za.
GOOD has submitted its comments to the City, noting that the previous 10 year lease means that the city’s ratepayers have been receiving R1 058 per year for the property. “This works out to about ten cents per month to rent a piece of land the size of a rugby field,” says Mark Rountree, the National Policy Officer for GOOD.
“GOOD’s policy is firmly based on using publically owned land, like the 46ha in Rondebosch, for the good of the public” said Rountree. The Western Cape Government confirmed that in 2018, there were 575,000 families on the province’s housing database. Although many families have one or both parents employed, a large proportion earn less than the R20,000 to R25,000 per month threshold needed to qualify for a bond. “These hundreds of thousands of families – the stuck middle – cannot qualify for free government housing because they earn too much, and cannot enter the private sector market because there is insufficient affordable housing in the lower end of the market” said Rountree.
Housing is an escalating crisis – in part manufactured by the DA’s own doing. The DA’s ill-considered dismantling of the City’s housing department within the Transport and Urban Development Authority at the end of 2018 has seen the delivery of new housing opportunities collapse – declining by 28% in 2019 after achieving a more than 30% increase in 2017 and a record – increasing by 42% over 2017 and exceeding the city’s annual delivery target for the first time ever – in 2018.
Rountree stated that “it is morally repugnant that the City, in light of the enormous and growing housing demand, and the DA’s self-inflicted reduced delivery, to not make key sites, such as the Rondebosch gold course, available for affordable housing development.”
Rountree, a wetland expert with almost 20 years’ experience, said that, whilst wetlands are very important, “the lame excuses put forward by the DA that the site cannot be developed because some wetlands are within or nearby the site is hypocritical. The DA’s own provincial leader is proposing to relocate the entire Provincial Parliament to a floodplain wetland site at the Two Rivers Urban Park.” GOOD disproved the DA’s excuses in an article (https://www.iol.co.za/news/opinion/why-wetlands-are-important-41867073) shared with the public on World Wetlands Day in February.
The South African Constitution states that everyone has the right to have access to adequate housing and that government “must take reasonable legislative and other measures, within its available resources, to achieve the progressive realisation of this right.” If the City of Cape Town does not make this land available, it will be in breach of its constitutional duty.
Government cannot afford to build everyone who needs a house a home, but it can partner with the private sector to
(1) Increase the rate of housing delivery by making land available;
(2) Reduce the costs by subsidising land costs for GAP and social (subsidised rental) housing, and
(3) Improve the location of new housing by ensuring that it uses well-located land for this.
GOOD wishes to state its strongest objections to the proposed lease renewal. “Apartheid has ended and it is time the DA stops reinforcing the National Party’s spatial apartheid city planning. The DA must adhere to its constitutional responsibilities and use its available resources to ensure more housing becomes available faster” said Rountree.
Ends
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Media enquiries:
Mark Rountree 082 880 4393