Simphiwe Mbalula’s home was saved last month when a runaway fire razed about 3Â 200 shacks in the Joe Slovo informal settlement outside Cape Town. Instead of relief, he feels unlucky, as all the victims of the fire have been fast-tracked to the front of council housing lists.
They will receive houses as part of the first phase of the N2 Gateway Project, a pilot housing plan adopted by Cabinet in September last year.
Sitting across the road from the site where the new houses will be built, Mbalula, a 32-year-old unemployed carpenter, says all the people in the area should get new houses, not just those who were victims of the fire.
The need for housing in Cape Town is so acute that competition for the new resources is pitting homeless residents against each other. Backyard dwellers claim their stake ahead of shack dwellers; recent arrivals from the Eastern Cape fear they will lose out to those who were born in the Western Cape.
“A lot of the people who lost their homes in Joe Slovo are not Cape born,” says Mbalula.
The N2 Gateway project is an innovative plan to provide a range of mixed housing options for Cape Town residents. Ultimately, the plan is meant to end squatting in the province and to ensure that housing is integrated into the city and not situated only on the peripheries.
But the project is facing unexpected hurdles. Cape Town has a housing backlog of 261Â 000 homes, but estimates indicate that the city has the capacity and resources to build only 11Â 000 houses a year. And with an influx of 16Â 000 people a year into the city, delivery cannot meet demand.
Last week, the temporary shelters set up at Kwezi hostel for victims of the fire were damaged by other Joe Slovo residents upset at being left out of the housing project. Two weeks ago the Western Cape government had to go to court to evict 160 Bokmakierie residents from the disused Spes Bona school hostel in Athlone, which had also been earmarked for use by victims of the fire. Some of the Bokmakierie residents have been on the housing waiting list for between 10 and 15 years.
“It is natural for people to feel extremely disconcerted when they have waited [for so long]. The history of urbanisation in Cape Town is the history of squatting of black people,” says Ahmedi Vawda, the housing department’s head of the N2 Gateway project.
Plans to relocate the Bokmakierie residents formally from backyard shacks to formal houses have been in limbo for several years, caught up in a tangle of red tape. The court ordered the province to house the residents in tents next to the hostel until alternative arrangements can be made.
In contrast, the N2 Gateway project has, with Cabinet approval, cut through similar bureaucratic requirements to speed up housing delivery.
Karen Logentein, a 30-year-old mother of three, is angry that the dwellers from the Joe Slovo settlement will get houses ahead of those on the lists.
“They burn their shacks down, then they get R500 and a house built,” she complains.
The phenomenon of living in backyard shacks is widespread among predominantly coloured communities who “squat” in the yards of family members or friends.
“But [unlike shack dwellers] we pay rent to the homeowner, sometimes between R300 and R600,” says Nadeema Ali as she breastfeeds her two-month-old baby in a tent next to the Spes Bona hostel. She is hoping to be allowed to move back into the renovated hostel.
Some say life in the tents is much better than in the backyards.
“We [backyarders] are not allowed to use the toilet inside the main house. So our children use the buckets, then we have to throw it into the drain where we collect water from the tap,” says Teresa Jordaan (29). “It is not fair because my mother and I have been on the waiting list since 1998.”