GOOD Statement by Brett Herron,
GOOD Secretary-General & City of Cape Town Mayoral Candidate
21 September 2026
Today the Democratic Alliance leader, and Mayor of Cape Town, Geordin Hill-Lewis, reannounced the release of the Salt River Market site to Communicare for a mixed-income development, including social and affordable housing.
This will be the second time in four months that the Salt River Market site has been celebrated with a ceremonial handover – a repeat of what Hill-Lewis announced and did on 8 June 2026.
The Democratic Alliance has become a government of announcements.
The Salt River Market site will be heralded as progress for inner city affordable housing using well-located land and it will also be abused for crude party-political purposes as it was today.
Today it was an on-location advertising prop for the Democratic Alliance’s local government campaign.
There is nothing to celebrate today and the DA, and the Mayor, have no qualms in hiding their history with this site.
This site was first identified for a social housing project in 2008. Over many years the site was assessed, planned, debated and shelved.
In October 2018, as the then Mayco Member responsible for public housing, I attempted to dust-off the project by presenting a recommendation to Council to sell the site, at a discount value, to Communicare for the purposes of building social and affordable inner-city housing. It was the DA who blocked it and had the recommendation to council “referred back”.
Since October 2018 the DA has announced:
August 2019 – that the site would be released, as I had proposed (but with fewer social housing units) after it was rezoned;
July 2022 – the land would be released, and tabled the official release of the Salt River Market precinct land to Council;
September 2022 – the land sale agreement had been concluded;
May 2024 –that construction at the site is officially scheduled to begin in July 2024;
8 June 2026 – “The Official Physical Handover” – when Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis holds a ceremonial event officially handing over the physical property to developer.
The fact is that the Salt River Market site is not an example of the DA’s commitment to inner-city affordable housing. Quite the opposite, this project exposes their lack of commitment, and urgency, just as the Constitutional Court found in July this year in the Adonisi (Tafelberg School) judgment.
The DA has been in government in Cape Town for 22 of the 26 years that the current structure of the City of Cape Town has been in existence. Not one affordable housing unit has been built in the inner city, or surrounds, and not one brick has been laid.
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