Babalo Ndenze
Metro Writer
THE Dido Valley low-cost subsidised housing project on the scenic hills of Simon’s Town is back in the spotlight after positive reports from a city-appointed environmental consultancy and an archaeologist.
The development on the 8.03ha prime piece of land is intended to accommodate about 2 000 residents from the nearby Red Hill informal settlement and Vrygrond near Muizenberg.
But the project has not received support all round, with some property owners in the nearby houses raising concerns about the standard of the houses to be built and the impact on their property values of bringing people on to the land. The Dido Valley Affordable Housing Project – described as the “most expensive cheap housing development” – has been on the cards for 16 years.
The proposed housing project will have 600 residential units, a clinic, a crèche, a church and business area.
“There are no known adverse impacts associated with the proposed Dido Valley Affordable Housing Project (but) potentially significant positive impacts. These impacts include, particularly, the socio-economic benefits of moving people from an inadequately serviced informal settlement (Red Hill) to formal housing with adequate access to services, as well as the potential to remediate the adverse biophysical impacts associated with the Red Hill informal settlement,” reads the draft basic assessment report by De Villiers Brownlie Associates, the city-appointed environmental experts.
The report adds that the benefit for the local communities is that the development would be a “desirable” means of utilising the land with the urban area “efficiently”.
Archaeologist Ute Seemann, a city-appointed heritage consultant, wrote in his report that the surface survey covering the property revealed no archaeological remains.
“The 64 municipal sub-economic dwellings built during the late 1940s are of no historical, architectural, aesthetic value. From an archaeological (and) historical perspective no objections to the housing development could be found,” said Seemann.
Ndukuyakhe Ndlovu, a senior heritage officer at Heritage Western Cape, also wrote on August 10, 2007, that there were no objections to the proposals.
Christopher Bladen, a nearby resident, said the development would be tricky as only about 100 families from Red Hill would be accommodated.
“They’re also going to take people from Vrygrond in nearby Muizenberg to come all the way down here. It’s also going to make transport a problem,” Bladen said.
Another homeowner, Vincent Marinkowitz, who is an architect, said city authorities were still waiting for the environmental assessment.
“I'm an owner of one of the affected properties. If the development goes ahead in its current form, I will suffer loss of value in all probability. So I’m going through the report. It’s a very dense report. But they look like brick shacks from the design. This looks like it was ill-considered,” Marinkowitz said. Council official Eddie Thomas, the former project co-ordinator, said the process had taken more than a decade because it was a “very complicated piece of land”.
“And there was the economic downturn and all those things. But those brick houses are all going to be demolished. Funding will come from the national government. All subsidy housing comes from national,” Thomas said.