STATEMENT BY BRETT HERRON, GOOD SECRETARY GENERAL & MEMBER OF WESTERN CAPE PROVINCIAL PARLIAMENT
The City has chosen to create circumstances which will ensure there is no solution.
16 February 2021
City of Cape Town politicians have struck on a convenient new excuse for its failures to develop affordable housing in the inner city – ever. (Not even one affordable home has been developed in the area since the demise of apartheid, effectively maintaining the old group areas status quo.)
Instead of wasting their energy devising political strategies hinging on dishonest excuses, such as claiming that the occupation by housing activists of one site in Woodstock somehow prevents the development of any others sites, Mayor Dan Plato and Housing Mayco member Malusi Booi should take residents into their confidence and explain the thinking behind their resistance to spatial integration.
They must explain how their argument that the occupied Woodstock Hospital Site is the only site available for social housing in the area squares with the fact that they’ve just signed a lease to rent an alternative Newmarket Street site to Growthpoint Properties to be used as a parking lot.
They must explain how it squares with the fact that they cancelled all the inner city housing developments launched by former Mayor Patricia de Lille and I in September 2017 – in the CBD, Woodstock and Salt River – only to now conveniently pretend that the occupation of most complicated site to develop, Woodstock Hospital, is all that’s blocking their way.
In addition to the hospital site, Patricia de Lille and I identified several others that were vacant, derelict and thus fairly uncomplicated to develop – including the parking lot in Newmarket Street near the Good Hope Centre. Others included the Fruit and Veg site in Roeland Street, a vacant site in Pickwick Street in Salt River, and a vacant site opposite the Woodstock Hospital.
These sites would have yielded at least 2000 social housing units in several mixed income developments.
The idea that Cape Town can forever avoid breaking down its rigid apartheid spatial divisions reflects the continuing influence in the DA of former National Party operatives, the so-called conservative caucus. It is an idea that is short-sighted, discriminatory and unsustainable.
Plato and Booi are playing a dangerous game.
Instead of working with and engaging with the occupiers of the Woodstock Hospital site to find a solution they have chosen to demonise the occupiers knowing that this creates circumstances in which there is no solution. This is the perfect outcome for those who have no will to integrate the city or use public land to help resolve the affordable housing crisis.
ENDS…