GOOD Advisory & Statement by Brett Herron ,
GOOD Secretary-General & Member of the Western Cape Parliament
10 February 2025
GOOD Secretary-General Brett Herron will join Ndifuna Ukwazi and Reclaim the City at the Constitutional Court on Tuesday, 11 February 2025, to show our support ahead of the Tafelberg Case being heard.
Court is set to begin at 9am.
The GOOD Party supports the development of the Tafelberg site for social housing.
- In 2000, in the Grootboom Case, the Constitutional Court placed the State under obligation to progressively realise the right to housing.
- In 2024, in the Bromwell Street Case, the court established the principle that location is important – people evicted from the inner city couldn’t be relocated miles away to the city’s periphery.
- This week, in the Tafelberg School Case, the court is being asked to build on that principle, while affirming that public land must be used for public good.
On Tuesday, the Western Cape Government will have to explain to the Constitutional Court the reasoning behind its decision to sell the Tafelberg School property in Sea Point after declaring it “surplus to needs” in the context of a critical shortage of affordable housing in Cape Town.
There is not just a critical shortage of housing in Cape Town; since apartheid ended, the city and province have resisted developing housing for people of colour in well-located areas previously reserved for white citizens, maintaining the relationship between race and space engineered by the old Group Areas Act.
In the State of the Nation Address last week, the President said: “To tackle inequality, we need to undo apartheid spatial planning,” but the province is expected to dispute that it is constitutionally obliged to address its historic spatial legacy.
The Tafelberg matter speaks directly to the GOOD Party’s founding principles on spatial justice, that where people live matters, and that public land must be used for public good.
The court is hearing the case just two months after its seminal judgement in the so-called Bromwell Street eviction matter, in which the City of Cape Town was ordered to provide evicted residents with temporary emergency accommodation in the inner city as close to their current homes as possible.
The Tafelberg School and Bromwell Street cases collectively advance the constitutional principle upheld in another Cape Town housing matter, known as the Grootboom Case – 22 years ago – that the state has a duty to progressively realise the right to adequate housing. The Grootboom judgement has since become one of the most oft-cited court judgements in the world.
Tafelberg Site History
The Tafelberg School site was earmarked for redevelopment for social housing, and the Provincial housing department requested that the abandoned school be allocated to it for that purpose. But the DA-led Western Cape Government, then led by Helen Zille, decided the site was not appropriate for housing and sold it. This led to a new wave of housing activism in Cape Town, and litigation against the province.
In 2019, Zille’s successor Premier Alan Winde unequivocally committed the province to settling the Tafelberg litigation. But a few months later the province appealed a Western Cape High Court order to set aside the sale of the Tafelberg School site on the basis that the Province and the City had failed their constitutional duties to redress the apartheid spatial plan.
The Tafelberg Case has arrived at the Constitutional Court’s door because the Province and City appealed the High Court judgment to the Supreme Court of Appeals (SCA). The SCA upheld the appeal, and now the Constitutional Court is being asked to settle the matter once and for all.
It is an important case about the role of public land in achieving the socioeconomic rights of disadvantaged South Africans, and government’s obligation to actively mitigate apartheid’s spatial legacy of exclusion.
It is hoped that the Court will definitively decree that the right to housing includes a duty on the state to leverage public land for that purpose, and to use well-located public land to restructure the exclusionary housing patterns created by history and perpetuated by the current approach to public housing.
Nearly 70 years after the forced removal of more than 150,000 residents of colour began in Cape Town, the court must disabuse the DA-led province and city of the notion that using well-located land for affordable housing unfairly advantages the poor.
- On 8 February, Tafelberg court case applicants and supporters held an assembly at the Sea Point Methodist Church to inform housing activists of the Constitutional Court arguments and to discuss the latest, vague, announcement by the Western Cape Government about the future of the Tafelberg site. The Western Cape Premier and the MEC for Infrastructure were invited to address the assembly but declined.
Media enquiries:
Brett Herron, GOOD: Secretary-General & Member of the Western Cape Parliament
Cell: 082 5183264
Email: bretth@forgood.org.za
Samantha Jackson, GOOD: Media Manager
Cell: 083 5509875
Email: samantha@forgood.org.za