GOOD Speech by Brett Herron,
GOOD Secretary-General & Member of the Western Cape Parliament
03 September 2026
*Note to editors: This speech was delivered during an interpellation in the Provincial Parliament on Conradie Park
First Response:
Honourable Speaker, I thank the Minister for that answer, because it confirms exactly what I suspected: this government knows how to describe a Better Living Model far more fluently than it knows how to deliver one.
We have heard the vocabulary before, spatial integration, mixed-income living, live-work-play, a model for how post-apartheid Cape Town should be built.
Conradie Park was meant to be the proof of concept. The Minister has just given us the brochure. I would like to give this House the tenancy agreement.
I have spent time with residents of the social housing component at Conradie Park. Not with the marketing materials, with the people actually living the model. And what they describe is not integration. It is isolation, dressed up in better paint.
They described being switched onto a private smart-metering system, without meaningful consultation, watching prepaid balances disappear faster than they can explain, with no clarity on whether municipal tariffs or indigent support even apply to them.
They described a “live-work-play” precinct where the recreational facilities are functionally reserved for the private school next door.
They described seven-day eviction notices, and the particular terror of a household income dipping in a development that was sold to them as security.
They described damp and mould met with the advice to “open a window.” They described signing visitors in like inmates rather than tenants. And they described the City’s own indigent relief system, support they are legally entitled to, being obstructed because their social housing institution simply will not process the applications.
Honourable Speaker, that is not a Better Living Model. That is a well-photographed waiting room of disappointment.
The Minister’s answer described the aspiration, not the standard. This Department cannot point to a measurable standard, because if such a standard existed and Conradie Park were meeting it, we would not be hearing what residents are telling us.
A flagship project that cannot be measured against its own flagship criteria is not a model.
Second Response:
Honourable Speaker, I said I would return to this, and I will, because nothing I have heard in this debate has closed the gap I raised earlier, it has widened it.
I raised a simple point: what standards exist, and does Conradie Park meet them? What I have heard in response is the same pattern residents describe when they complain to management, the issue gets passed between institutions, a generic reply is offered, and nothing resolves.
If that is how this House treats an oversight matter, Honourable Speaker, imagine how it feels to be a tenant filing a maintenance complaint.
Let me raise what I did not have time to raise earlier, because the list of gaps between promise and practice at Conradie Park is longer than one response can carry.
Residents described annual rental increases they cannot reconcile with their actual household incomes, and real uncertainty about whether unit allocations still comply with the income bands this development was supposed to serve.
They described insufficient lighting and dark areas where theft and criminal activity have become routine, in a precinct marketed on safety as much as on style. They described elderly residents left without organised support, no mobility assistance, no coordinated access to medical care, carrying the daily weight of this development’s failures with the least capacity to absorb them.
A recent death was referred to in the same conversation, Honourable Speaker, in a development with no visible structure for anyone in distress to be caught.
And where was the employment this precinct promised, the commercial opportunities, the possible hospital, the jobs that were meant to flow from “live-work-play”?
Residents are still asking. Where was the public transport adequate to a “model” development? Residents are still waiting on commitments made and not kept.
What connects every one of these, Honourable Speaker, is not any single failure. It is the absence of a mechanism for residents to be heard and answered, the same absence that runs through this Department’s response today.
Honourable Speaker, a flagship is supposed to show the fleet where to sail. Right now, Conradie Park is showing us where the water is shallow.
The physical development is not in dispute, the buildings exist, the render was accurate. What was never delivered is the equivalent standard of social integration and tenant empowerment that made this a “model” in the first place, rather than simply a building. Residents did not ask for a flagship.
They asked for a home that works. This government owes them the standard it promised, not the slogan it delivered.
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