The City of Cape Town is proceeding with its land release on the historic Castle bowling green in Woodstock, despite a decision by the Western Cape Heritage council to endorse a heritage impact assessment recommending the land be preserved as urban green space.
Cape Town is a postcard; it is often literally cinematic. Chapel Street, just minutes from the city centre, lent its picturesque poverty to Season 4 of Homeland. A few years down the line, the street is no longer pretending to be in Pakistan, at a steep fee, and the poverty is more anxiously apparent. A roof on a century-old terrace row has caved in or blown away.
A kilometre away, there is a colony living in tents on the pavement outside the castle, opposite city hall from where President Cyril Ramaphosa delivered the State of the Nation address last week.
Two worlds exist alongside and seeing both no longer requires driving from the seafront at Bantry Bay to the sand-flats squalor of Khayelitsha, or comparing the broken railway line running to the townships with the ease of paying online for a car licence which promptly arrives in the post.
The disparities are fodder for the ANC, which lost control of the city in 2006 and risks losing its national electoral majority next year. Minister in the Presidency Mondli Gungubele called the Democratic Alliance’s flagship project a monument to enduring inequality.
“The point that I’m making to you is that the Western Cape is a test of the resilience of racial exclusion,” he told DA leader John Steenhuisen, who had just delivered an aggressive election speech in response to the president’s address.
The minister “fluffed it”, as one ANC member said privately, by blaming the DA for the dire state of police stations in Gugulethu, Philippi and Khayelitsha.
In each of these townships there is one police officer per roughly 1 770 residents but policing is a national function. Khayelitsha has one of the highest murder rates in the country, with 265 homicides in 2021-22.
Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis responded to Gungubele by noting that “around 71% of police stations in our region are under-resourced by the national government”, hence the city has deployed 1 200 newly appointed law enforcers to high-crime areas.
“We hope the minister’s inadvertent discovery that he and the national government actually run police stations spurs him to do something about this resource shortfall, particularly on the Cape Flats.”
There have been suggestions, third force allegations if you will, that other parties have covertly encouraged efforts to destabilise the DA-led metropole for political gain.
“It is not destabilising on a massive level but the utilisation of various forms of criminal enterprises to undermine [local governance] and ensure that communities continue to be afflicted by various social ills in a manner that it looks like bad governance,” said Simon Howell, criminologist at the University of Cape Town.
Howell recalled reports that former president Jacob Zuma socially engaged with gangster bosses, including the likes of Quinton “Mr Big” Marinus and Americans gang leader Igshaan Davids at his Cape Town home in May 2011, ostensibly to shore up support against the DA.
AmaBhungane quoted Marinus: “Mr President, we will mobilise our members and work hard for you.”
Mayoral committee member for safety and security in Cape Town JP Smith said social movements, including the Ses’khona People’s Rights Movement, which is linked to the ANC, sought to destabilise the city.
In 2013, at the time of the group’s faeces-throwing airport protest, Helen Zille, then mayor, accused Ses’khona of running an “ungovernability campaign” to unsettle the DA-led provincial government.
Smith said the bigger threat was “the formal entry into government and smaller governments around the province — and nationally — by organised crime groups masquerading as a political party”. He told the Mail & Guardian these groups “openly flirt with the gang culture”.
The debate on housing and land is even more complex than that on crime, with obfuscating rhetoric and valid blame from both sides.
West of Chapel Street lies the wasteland of District Six. The national government has the lead role in redevelopment of the area razed by the apartheid regime after it was declared a white area in 1968. About 300 housing units have been built since restitution claims were filed more than 20 years ago.
To the east, lie Woodstock and Salt River, where the city is releasing six swaths of land for social housing developments in what it terms the best option for reversing apartheid spatial planning and mitigating the impact of gentrification. Four of these, in a radius of roughly 200 metres in Upper Woodstock, would have roughly 1 600 units.
Earlier this month, it prevailed in court in an eviction battle turned constitutional challenge brought by 25 tenants who have continued to occupy a row of houses in Bromwell Street in Woodstock sold to a developer in 2013 for R3.15 million.
The sale was part of a development boom driven by tax breaks the metro offered in an urban renewal drive, which drove up property rates. In 2019, property rates in Salt River increased by an average 92%, and by 53% in lower Woodstock, encouraging an exodus of the working class.
The Bromwell litigants demanded emergency housing in the area and the high court found the city was obliged to comply. The supreme court of appeal differed, ruling that the city was not under a constitutional obligation to accommodate the evictees at a specific location.
The ruling sets legal precedent that will make it easier for the city to evict occupants from other sites in Woodstock, which remained a mixed-race, working-class area under apartheid and is privately described by city officials as low-hanging fruit for land release.
Last week, Hill-Lewis told the M&G: “From our point of view, we are trying to do what we can to break down that apartheid spatial planning. A part of that planning is certainly more visible in Cape Town.
“We are trying to unlock more affordable housing in the best located parts of the city to allow for young black and coloured professionals to live closer to where they work. Of course, I’d like it to go faster … But we are chipping away at that legacy.”
Independent development consultant Jodi Allemeier countered that the city’s biggest housing developments were going up in far-flung areas. Forest Village is out past Eerste River and Penhill in a peri-rural setting near Stellenbosch.
“These projects aren’t linked to economic land use and they didn’t preplan the transport routes. Forest Village has an entirely predictable response to that with contestation as to who will have the taxi route and keeping informal trading off the street outside,” Allemeier said.
The relatively low number of units the city is fast-tracking near the central business district cannot offset the social inequity of those on the outskirts, she said.
“You can’t say we are creating another segregated township here of 10 000 here, 15 000 there … and that it is justifiable because we are going to build 600 social housing units in the inner city.”
The mayor has a similar balancing act in dealing with growing numbers living on the city’s streets.
The council drew outrage with a 2021 bylaw that imposes fines of up to R500 on those remaining on the streets after refusing offers of social assistance. Hill-Lewis responded by saying the city realised the better approach was offering help, firstly in the form of more safe havens.
(John McCann/M&G)
The council will spend R142 million to bring the number of spaces in shelters in the CBD and northern suburbs to 1 060, but the numbers do not match the need. In 2018, there were 6 150 homeless people in the city and Hill-Lewis said the problem has since “only burgeoned”.
The ANC routinely accuses the mayor, the metro and the DA provincial government of playing a disingenuous game on social redress for those living at the far end of the central railway line that was shut down in 2019, due to theft and vandalism.
Nomi Nkondlo, an ANC member of the provincial legislature, said the DA had obstructed the reopening of the project by failing to fund the relocation of those who’ve set up informal settlements on the line.
“The understanding was they would fund the acquisition of this land. Now again, the province has reneged,” she said, before disputing the city’s insistence it was allocating municipal resources equitably.
“In Gugulethu, you have one swimming pool. In this heat, it has been closed for more than five years. Recently, in Claremont, they have spent more than R5 million to renovate a swimming pool on that side.”
The real answer on resource distribution will lie in deep budget analysis of infrastructure maintenance and grant allocation.
Allemeier believes the budget may be skewed to wealthier areas but said there was also an optic distortion due to the city’s 50 improvement districts, where services are funded by ratepayers but delivered by private organisations.
“People will make the comparison with the township but the city is delivering the same service and the improvement district is delivering the visible difference.”
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