GOOD statement by Brett Herron,
GOOD Secretary-General & Member of the Western Cape Parliament
20 December 2024
We welcome the Constitutional Court’s judgment on the City of Cape Town’s failure to implement a coherent housing plan and plan for the inevitable displacement caused by gentrification.
The court ultimately rules that where people live matters. It has always mattered; that’s why the Group Areas Act was such a critical apartheid lever.
Of the City’s current approach to affordable and emergency housing, the Court said its, “… broader vision appears to be a thoroughly misguided and ill-conceived project rooted in the perpetuation of spatial segregation and the infamous influx control, in an attempt to inexplicably “preserve” the inner city by marginalising poor persons.”
The judgment confirms the duty of our governments’, at the various levels, to address inherited spatial injustice as part of their housing programmes.
Governments need to be nimble, reasonable and innovative as they navigate urban pressures of rapid urbanisation, urban development and gentrification.
In a severely critical judgment, the Court chastised the City’s plan to address access to affordable housing solely through a social housing programme at the expense of its duty to also provide emergency or transitional housing.
The case over which the Court was presiding has a long history, dating back to 2016, and the plight of these residents of Bromwell Street substantially influenced the affordable housing programme former Mayor Patricia De Lille and I (then the Mayoral Committee Member for Transport and Urban Development) launched in 2017.
Bromwell Street highlighted how the City’s housing plan had failed to adequately prepare for gentrification, and the City’s constitutional duty to provide transitional or emergency housing.
Facilities such as emergency housing at Wolwerivier were – and remain – totally unsuitable, and in my view unconstitutional.
At the time I said, “where people live matters”. Today the Constitutional Court confirmed not only that it matters but that there is a constitutional duty on our governments to make it matter.
The Inner City Affordable Housing project, De Lille and I launched in September 2017, included two sites earmarked for transitional or emergency housing in Woodstock and Salt River – one in Pickwick Street and one in James Street.
Fortunately, the Pickwick Street project was completed by late 2018 and before we resigned from the DA and the City of Cape Town. It was used to provide transitional housing to families living in Pine Road, Woodstock, where a social housing project was planned.
The plan was for those families to return to Pine Road once the social housing had been constructed. Regrettably, there is no sign of social housing on the Pine Road site and the families have been in transitional housing for more than six years.
After De Lille and I left, the City the Democratic Alliance government rushed to cancel the Inner City Affordable Housing Project, including the James Street transitional housing project it included.
While Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis has since released the same land parcels we identified seven years ago for affordable housing, he has focussed exclusively on the public announcements of land release and ignored the financial modelling to make these projects happen. Thus we still have not seen a single affordable or social housing project unit developed in the inner city.
The Constitutional Court also made an important statement about “gentrification” when it departed from the Supreme Court of Appeals judgment and clarified the harmful effects of gentrification especially when there is no plan to mitigate the displacement.
It said: “Another fallacy is that the Supreme Court of Appeal described gentrification as a form of urban renewal and development for commercial and business purposes. This is clearly wrong… (it) results in an influx of higher income residents and the displacement of the lower income and often marginalised or minority inhabitants”.
The Constitutional Court judgment is seminal.
It provides guidance to both the City of Cape Town and the Western Cape Provincial Government on their duty to redress apartheid spatial planning.
It is a lesson that both governments need to take on board when it comes to the future of the Woodstock Hospital (Cissie Gool House) and Helen Bowden Nurses Home (Ahmad Kathadra House) and their occupants – who the City and Province plan to evict.
The City and the Province clearly need to engage with the occupiers and find a just, dignified and constitutionally compliant solution because the message from the Constitutional Court is clear: Where people live matters more than ever.
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