STATEMENT BY BRETT HERRON, GOOD MEMBER OF THE WESTERN CAPE PROVINCIAL PARLIAMENT AND SECRETARY-GENERAL
17 NOVEMBER 2020
THE COST OF CAPE TOWN’S FAILING POLITICAL LEADERSHIP
When former Mayor of Cape Town Patricia De Lille resigned from the DA in disgust, the City rushed to cancel a clutch of proposals lined up to develop more than 4000 homes in the Inner City, Woodstock and Salt River for residents unable to pay the price of gentrification.
Now, the city argues in the Bromwell eviction case before the Western Cape High Court, it is unable to provide alternative emergency housing and affordable housing solutions in the inner city, Woodstock and Salt River. The residents facing eviction must follow the same path their parents and grandparents were forced to take by the apartheid government and re-build their lives on the Cape Flats.
It is a cruelly circular argument, that demonstrates total disregard for people who still bear the scars of the forced removal of their community in the 1960s and 1970s – and which betrays the total collapse of political leadership in Cape Town.
The truth, that the DA leadership won’t tell you, is that when the Bromwell Street residents first faced eviction, in 2016, the City was unable to provide alternative housing in the Woodstock and Salt River areas because it hadn’t planned or developed any. Eighteen months later, De Lille and I had identified a number of public sites suitable for affordable and transitional emergency housing.
In September 2017 we launched these sites and issued a call for development proposals for:
- The Woodstock Hospital, Woodstock
- Pickwick Street, Salt River
- Roeland Street, City Centre
- New Market Street, City Centre.
The projects would have delivered a minimum of 4000 housing units, with at least half that number being social housing.
We also identified a site in James Street, Salt River, to be developed into transitional emergency housing. This transitional housing site could have addressed the transitional or temporary housing needs for families facing the emergency of eviction.
When Mayor Dan Plato cancelled these projects, for no valid reason, the effect was to pull the plug on any inner city affordable housing. Which brings us to the point we’re now at: Without a single affordable housing unit and without any progress on developing a transitional site.
The fact that, four years after the Bromwell families first faced eviction, the City has still not developed a single affordable housing unit in the inner city is entirely of the Mayor’s and his handlers’ making.
The affordable housing crisis in Cape Town requires mature and caring political leadership, and political will.
Instead we have an inept Mayor and government, who consistently place the city’s most vulnerable residents at the bottom of their agenda.
ENDS…