Speech by Brett Herron, GOOD Member of the Western Cape Provincial Parliament and Secretary General
6 May 2021
If this government wants to resolve the housing crisis it will stop hiding behind the false excuse that land is unavailable and funding had been cut.
A government that is committed to increasing the rate of delivery and addressing the housing shortage can make it happen.
It suits this government to hide its failures behind funding cuts and false claims that it has no access to land.
The real reason housing delivery is regressing in the Western Cape and the City of Cape Town is because you do not regard housing as your responsibility.
You are constrained by the limits of national government grant funding only because you choose to be.
You found R1.3 billion to play cops and robbers with people’s lives.
You had a choice to invest in housing, or education. But you chose a play-play police force.
Your party is in government in the Province, in the city and in over 20 municipalities in the Western Cape. You have access to thousands and thousands of hectares of land.
Your party has absolute discretion to allocate suitable land to address the housing shortage and spatial integration.
But you choose not to.
Housing is not a priority – if it were – you could turn around your failing housing delivery by changing your attitude.
You can deliver the 10 000 housing opportunities you promised – and you don’t need national government funding and you don’t need national government land.
You have been making the same damn promises since for 10 years.
In 2010 you tabled a CAPE TOWN CENTRAL CITY REGENERATION
PROGRAMME – that programme promised to “Achieve densification by developing
affordable housing” in the inner city.
Your 2010 promise identified sites in the inner city that you could use for affordable housing without the need of any national government land.
You have had a plan for 11 years – the only excuse for not implementing this plan is that you have no political will to do so.
Its just another bold announcement signifying nothing. You have literally been a government of announcements since you took office.
If you want to build 10 000 inner city affordable housing units:
Release Tafelberg School to social housing
Release this large Dorp Street precinct for a mixed use development including social housing and affordable house
Release Government Garage
Release the Prestwich Street precinct
Whatever happened to the Artscape Precinct project?
Dust off the City of Cape Town’s Inner City Affordable Housing Plan, which you cancelled, and:
Release Pickwick Street
Release Newmarket Street
Release Roeland Street/Fruit and Veg site
You can trot out promises on the eve of elections every 2 or 3 years – but your track-record remains a big fat zero because you are in government to protect privilege and the status quo – but you need to make those false promises to get back into government.
Ends