GOOD Press Statement by Axolile Notywala,
GOOD City of Cape Town Councillor
27 November 2024
The GOOD Party is concerned that the extension of the public participation process regarding the sale of the Woodstock Hospital will be pointless as the City of Cape Town is unable to address the key questions that have been on the table for months.
What will happen to the current occupants of Woodstock hospital?
And where will they be evicted to?
GOOD believes the current public participation process is just a tick box on the way to approval without any intent on engaging with communities.
Yesterday, Mayoral Committee Member for Human Settlements, Councillor Carl Pophaim, announced that the public participation period on the Woodstock Hospital site has been extended to 31 January 2025.
The on-again and off-again project was launched in 2017. The City announced affordable housing projects on 11 sites around Woodstock and Salt River, all within a 5km of the city centre and with good access to public transport.
However, these projects were all blocked by the Democratic Alliance and never saw the light of day.
Fast forward to 2022, the same plan was once again announced by Cape Town Mayor, Geordin Hill-Lewis.
However, in the 5 years of the project being abandoned, the Woodstock hospital has become home to over 800 occupants, known as ‘Cissie Gool House’.
In August, the motion for the sale of the site for private development of affordable housing was tabled in council, as GOOD we raised concerns that there is no plan to address what will happen to the current occupants.
We are opposed to any sale of land that will lead to more homelessness and landlessness and that will violently displace people and relegate them to the peripheries of our City.
Just this month, we witnessed the Castle of Good Hope evictions.
These evictions, while technically legal, represent the latest assault on the dignity of the vulnerable in our city.
The sale of public land in Cape Town perpetuates the violence of spatial Apartheid.
Where people live matters.
Councillor Pophaim makes the claim, that “The illegal occupation of the Woodstock Hospital site has been the single biggest delay to this development.”
The DA has governed Cape Town since 2006. 18 years later, not one single social housing unit has been built in the inner city of Cape Town.
The GOOD Party suggests that the DA is the biggest delay to affordable inner-city housing.
The majority of those who currently occupy Cissie Gool House are Black and Coloured, long-term residents of Woodstock, who faced evictions or had been evicted as a result of the gentrification in Cape Town.
Instead of blaming poor and working-class people who have made a home for themselves due to government failures, and criminalising them, Councillor Pophaim, Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis and the City of Cape Town have an opportunity to show that the City of Cape Town cares, particularly for the homeless and landless majority of this City.
So far this has all been rhetoric with no results.
We call on all the people of Cape Town, to stand with us against spatial apartheid and stop the suffering in Cape Town.
Public land must be used for public good!
Media Enquiries:media@forgood.org.za