GOOD Statement by Brett Herron ,
GOOD Secretary-General & Member of the Western Cape Parliament
30 January 2025
The announcement by the Western Cape Provincial Government that the Tafelberg School is no longer “surplus to needs” and that the school building would be used for social services either for the disabled or for the elderly is nothing more than a political tactic.
MEC’s for Infrastructure, Tertuis Simmers, and Social Development, Jaco Londt, made the announcement today, adding that further studies would be done to determine whether the remainder of the site would be viable for affordable housing.
Clearly this is nothing more than a tactic.
The use of the site for social services has been made on a whim, has not been properly planned and is dependent on a call for proposals. This tactic is intended to frustrate the opportunity to use the site for affordable housing.
Numerous feasibility studies of the Tafelberg School site have already shown that the site is viable for affordable housing when the school building is included.
If the school building is excluded the remainder of the site may still be viable for affordable housing but the opportunity for cross-subsidisation is lost and the project becomes more dependent on state subsidies.
The Democratic Alliance government is motivated by malice and spite. They will do anything not to accede to the demands to provide affordable housing on this site.
This site has become a symbol of their failures and their ideological integrity and they are determined not to concede.
The Tafelberg School site has been at the centre of the battleground for inner-city affordable housing for nearly a decade.
The Western Cape Provincial Government’s sudden and irrational decision to abandon commitments to use the empty school, and the bordering properties, for affordable housing was the spark that created housing activist organisation Reclaim The City and also led to the occupation of the Woodstock Hospital (or Cissie Gool House) as well as the Helen Bowden Nursing Home (or Achmat Kathrada House).
At the beginning of his first term of office Premier Alan Winde gave an undertaking to settle the Tafelberg matter and intimated that his new government would make the site available for affordable housing. Six years later, he has reneged on that undertaking.
Today his government announced an idea – not a plan.
But that announcement is not made in a vacuum, it is made in the context of potentially embarrassing litigation.
The Western Cape High Court delivered a scathing judgment in which it found that the Western Cape Provincial Government and the City of Cape Town had failed in their constitutional obligations to use public assets, like the Tafelberg School, to address the legacy of the apartheid spatial plan. That judgment set aside the sale of the property.
The Western Cape High Court judgment was set aside on appeal by the Supreme Court of Appeals and is now due to be argued in the Constitutional Court on 11 February 2025.
The decision by the Provincial Government that the building is no longer “surplus to needs” makes the appeal on the disposal of the site to a private school moot.
But it does not mean that the fight for affordable housing on the site, on the Atlantic Seaboard or in the inner city, is over.
In fact, this tactic demonstrates that there is a need to intensify this fight because the Democratic Alliance governments are willing to resort to ad hoc and whimsical tactics to create illusions.
The province has undoubtedly failed the working-class families of Cape Town, unabashedly turning a blind eye to the housing crisis that the Tafelberg site could have contributed to resolving.
The housing development would have been a crucial leap toward the creation of a socially integrated Cape Town. It could have allowed the working class to become part of an otherwise segregationist city.
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