By Lenore Oliver
The government's bid to deliver urgently homes and provide people with shelter in the Western Cape had failed because "the rules and frameworks of the past" were not changed, Local Government and Housing MEC Richard Dyantyi said at the launch of the Isidima housing strategy.
The strategy, launched on Thursday, aims to take a fresh approach at providing adequate housing in the province.
Isidima means dignity.
| 'All we did was replace shacks with bricks' |
"We can see what apartheid has left us with," Dyantyi said. "We are grappling with those (housing) issues on a daily basis.
"The question we have to ask ourselves is how we responded. It is a fact that, in our hurry to deliver and ensure that people have shelter, we didn't change the framework of the past.
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"That's our legacy 13 years after democracy. We've failed from bringing people in from the peripheries of our city and in 13 years we were not decisive in engaging with these issues.
"All we did was replace shacks with bricks."
Dyantyi said the N2 gateway was a valuable lesson for Western Cape housing authorities.
| 'Isidima is part of Dyantyi's bigger Sustainable Human Settlement Strategy' |
"When we built the N2 we were using old tools and not implementing a new vision.
"This project is one of our key lessons and it was an important beginning and an opportunity for us to improve."
Isidima is part of Dyantyi's bigger Sustainable Human Settlement Strategy and works on the premise of "Breaking New Ground", which seeks to resolve the province's housing problems as a whole over time.
Dyantyi said the Western Cape's challenge was to find a solution that avoided the RDP housing projects on the periphery of the city and the serviced site projects, also on the urban periphery.
Through the Isidima strategy municipalities, community-based organisations and the private sector would forge the implementation of the new vision to provide housing.
According to a document on the present housing situation in the province, only 14 000 RDP-type housing units would be built each year if the status quo remains.
Dyantyi said Isidima would take place within the national housing policy, but would be specific to the needs of the Western Cape.
"The shift will be from a focus on projects for the poor to the housing system as a whole," he said.
Dyantyi said the former policy framework replicated the apartheid spatial pattern because the cost of land needed to be covered by a subsidy, which meant that the poor would get housing where land was cheapest.
- This article was originally published on page 6 of Cape Argus on June 22, 2007
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