GOOD Statement by Brett Herron,
GOOD Secretary-General & City of Cape Town Mayoral Candidate
03 October 2026
If Cape Town’s “plan” to develop the Foreshore is real, Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis must tell residents what it’s going to cost, who is going to pay, how long it is going to take, whether Transnet has agreed to release port land, and how many affordable houses will be delivered. Without such basic information, what is being marketed by the DA-led City as a “plan” is in fact hollow election-linked puffery.
Ten years ago, under Mayor Patricia de Lille, the City called for proposals to finish the unfinished freeways and build inner-city housing. The deal was simple: A developer would build the transport links and housing, including affordable homes, in exchange for the right to develop City land. Ratepayers would not carry the cost. Who does the Mayor propose to pay the cost this time? Hill-Lewis isn’t saying.
De Lille established a transparent process that led to six consortia submitting bids. In February 2018, a qualifying bidder was announced, proposing to complete the missing freeway links and build about 3 200 market homes and at least 450 affordable homes. But five months later, the project became a casualty of the DA’s toxic assault on its own mayor.
Now, weeks before an election, according to the Mayor, the project has been resurrected. Several of Hill-Lewis’ headline features (a freeway tunnel, a new link along Duncan Road and a harbour promenade towards Sea Point) appeared in bids publicly exhibited at the Civic Centre in 2017, as part of the process the DA abandoned. The DA has cut-and-pasted the ideas but dropped the part that made them affordable: Private funding.
In 2018, the DA-run City cited a weaker economic outlook as one reason to cancel a project that would have cost ratepayers nothing. Now it announces a proposal to replace an elevated freeway with a tunnel, without saying what it costs or who pays. Boston did exactly that with its “Big Dig”: First estimated at US$2.8 billion, it finished at about US$14.8 billion.
Cape Town’s tunnel would be dug through the Foreshore itself: land reclaimed from Table Bay between 1937 and 1945, built from dredged sand, mud and rock, building rubble and municipal waste, right beside the harbour. What will it cost to tunnel through that, Mr Hill-Lewis, and who carries the risk when it overruns?
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