Statement by Brett Herron, GOOD Secretary-General and Mayoral candidate for the City of Cape Town
15 September 2021
The Western Cape Government’s flagship housing project, Forest Village, is an inglorious sprawling RDP-style development without a soul on the very edge of Cape Town’s urban spread – carefully located to maintain the pattern of apartheid planning.
Construction quality is poor, and the so-called village is so far from job opportunities and business districts that getting there is unaffordable for many residents…another case of the poorer you are, the more you must pay to get where you need to go.
The DA-led Western Cape government proclaims Forest Village as a model of spatial justice and transformation when, in truth, it is a new model of old space-race division not too dissimilar to Delft or Atlantis.
When I visited residents yesterday, they were not without gratitude for the relief of roofs over their families’ heads – but also disappointed. Roofs leak, and there are already issues with dampness, water pressure, and collapsed ceilings.
Forest Village is exactly how government should not be doing housing.
The development, on 72 hectares beyond Mfuleni and Blue Downs, nearer Somerset West than Cape Town, embodies all the problems we know well from large-scale housing projects undertaken in the past.
By building 4 000 BNG (or RDP) homes in one development, and eschewing considerations of mixed-use and integration, the province’s flagship is in fact a new dormitory suburb of poverty that is already experiencing similar social and crime problems typical of all the others.
Despite logging building quality “snags” with the housing department and construction companies, residents I spoke to yesterday said nothing has been fixed since they took occupation of their homes two and three years ago.
New bulk services are also not coping. All the manhole covers I saw were burping steady streams of wastewater or sewerage.
Large parts of the development are sealed off behind barbed wire as incomplete units appear abandoned, with obvious signs of deterioration and vandalism.
There are 500 units that appear to have been completed but have not yet been allocated to beneficiaries. This is an appalling failure of leadership when you consider there are nearly 400 000 people on Cape Town’s housing waiting list.
Residents say the reason these units haven’t been allocated (some have been standing vacant for more than a year) is because they are being held back for handover during the DA’s election campaign. In the meantime, they are being broken into, hijacked, and/or vandalised.
There is a large pile of broken sanitary ware that must already be replaced.
Instead of building new ghettoes on green land on the edge of the city, a GOOD-led city government would focus on infill developments closer to the city’s heart. Numbers are important, given the need, but so too is beginning the process of integrating communities and bringing people of colour back within the fabric of the city.
In the meantime, I will be submitting questions to the MEC for Housing, Tertuis Simmers, to get answers that Forest Village residents tell me they have been unable to get.
This is not how public housing should be delivered.
It is an insult that is compounded by Cape Town’s post-apartheid failure to build a single affordable home in well-located areas previously reserved for Whites. With property prices in such areas steep, it effectively means few who were forcibly removed in the past will ever have the opportunity to return.
Instead of compounding divisions in a rigidly divided city, spatial injustice must be fixed. Developing an integrated city that is at peace with its past and present will be good for residents and good for business.
For media inquiries, please contact:
Ms Karabo Tledima
Cell: 0617943819
Email: karabot@forgood.org.za