GOOD Statement by Brett Herron,
GOOD Secretary-General & City of Cape Town Mayoral Candidate
18 August 2026
The DA is on a privatisation roll, dismissing its constitutional obligations to address spatial injustice, selling off well-located publicly owned properties in Cape Town, and championing the out-sourcing of basic service provision in dysfunctional municipalities.
Under DA leader and Mayor of Cape Town Geordin Hill-Lewis, the city now sits alongside Hong Kong, Barcelona and Vancouver at the top table of the least affordable housing markets for local citizens in the world. Cape Town also makes the podium of the most unequal cities in the world, together with Hong Kong, Mumbai and Rio.
Since the advent of democracy, Cape Town has slavishly adhered to the apartheid spatial plan by locating all new subsidised housing in areas previously set aside for people of colour, while not delivering a single affordable home in the inner-city or surrounding areas.
Those spatial choices, together with the effect of property prices soaring in the best-located areas, once reserved for Whites, have increasingly locked Cape Flats residents into their separate silo where apartheid put them.
The quality of life for most residents in Manenberg or Crossroads today differs little to that of 50 years ago…
Hill-Lewis however dismisses the terms “spatial apartheid”, as political propaganda no longer rooted in reality and, “privatisation”, as a naughty p-word.
Hill-Lewis is correct that most citizens couldn’t care whether a private company or the municipality picks up their trash, and that there are many examples of successful public-private partnerships in the delivery of basic services across South Africa and the world. He is also correct that in democratic systems, elected governments are responsible for policy.
These are arguments with which many living in the relative splendour of Cape Town’s suburbs will agree.
But where the arguments fall flat is that the public sector is not going to magically fulfil the unsexy and unprofitable constitutional mandate to effect social justice in Cape Town on the DA’s behalf.
Sure, the private sector will snap up well-located public land and offer to include a few affordable houses on the side, but that’s hardly going to resolve the city’s 680 000 housing backlog, or the filth and inhuman conditions which is the daily lived reality of hundreds of thousands of Capetonians.
Cape Town is different to the other unaffordable cities on the global list because of its history. Until a generation ago Cape Town embodied the spatial plan of a system described by the UN as a crime against humanity. It still embodies that spatial plan.
Blending Cape Town’s two separate worlds and blurring the extreme colour-coded differences in citizens’ quality of life requires the development of enabling policy and a commitment to post-colonial redress.
What we have seen over the past 20 years, instead, is a consolidation of Cape Town’s separateness through the prioritisation of the well-located property market and tourist industries… and the counterweight de-prioritisation of areas associated with poverty, the gang culture, indignity and loss of self-esteem.
It is such thinking that prioritises the safety of travellers along the N2 by building a containment wall to block access by people from the surrounding slums, rather than spending the money converting Barcelona, Europe, Vukuzenzele, New Rest, Lusaka, Gxagxa, Thabo Mbeki, Taiwan and Kanana (yes, they have names) into functional communities.
The City of Cape Town is not a dysfunctional municipality, but millions of its residents inhabit totally dysfunctional neighbourhoods. That’s not due to poor financial management but to exclusionary political choices that perpetuate injustice and render long-term stability unsustainable.
Finding the correct balance should not involve taking away that which the City does well, in areas in which residents pay relatively high rates, but extending the same level of services to more communities.
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