GOOD Statement by Suzette Little,
GOOD City of Cape Town Councillor & Caucus Chairperson
16 August 2023
The GOOD Party is calling on Cape Town Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis to address the city’s inner-city housing crisis instead of being shocked by the distances people need to travel for work.
In the statement calling on rail devolution, Hill-Lewis said, “the lack of a functional passenger rail system was severely felt in Cape Town during the recent violent minibus-taxi stay away, with thousands of commuters forced to walk as far as 30km to get home due to the strike.”
He is correct, no one should have been forced to walk such distances.
But the mayor fails to acknowledge that the people of his city are forced to travel those long distances daily (by any transport system available to them) because the DA has failed to undo the apartheid spatial injustices.
The overwhelming majority of citizens of colour remain on the periphery where they were forcibly placed generations ago.
The relationship between former Cape Town Mayor Patricia de Lille and the DA turned sour when de Lille insisted that social housing be developed in and around the City Bowl to begin to reverse the pain and shame of apartheid-forced removals.
De Lille and her then-Mayco Member for Housing Brett Herron championed a process that led to the identification of six valuable sites, owned by the city, and attracted a number of viable proposals from property developers.
After de Lille and Herron resigned to establish GOOD, the City cancelled the initiative.
Five years later, one of the original project blockers Geordin Hill-Lewis, relaunched the initiative in new wrapping paper, calling it the Mayoral Priority Programme for Affordable Housing Land Release.
And even though the same land parcels have again been identified for release for social housing, the DA government has not managed to deliver a single inner-city affordable housing unit in its 17 years of leadership in Cape Town.
This failure has forced over a million Capetonians to rely on any form of public transport available to them, whether it is legal or safe.
As the GOOD Party, we support the devolution of transport functions to the city as envisaged in the National Land Transport Act.
But GOOD calls on the mayor to address social housing solutions within his government’s powers.
The marginalised communities of Cape Town deserve the city to address the housing crisis.
Media Enquiries:
Suzette Little, GOOD City of Cape Town Councillor
Cell: 073 321 5036
Email: suzettel@forgood.org.za
Samantha Jackson, GOOD Acting Media Manager
Cell: 083 550 9875
Email: media@forgood.org.za