Cape Town - The Western Cape provincial government is being accused of entrenching apartheid-style town planning in Cape Town for wanting to sell or lease four pieces of prime city property, instead of developing it for housing.
Social activist group Ndifuna Ukwazi has slammed Public Works MEC Donald Grant for forging ahead with a 2014 decision to dispose of the properties in Sea Point, Green Point and Gardens.
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The former Tafelberg Remedial School in Sea Point, which included a block of apartments, has been sold to the Phyllis Jowell day school for R135 million.
The other properties the province plans to sell or lease include a former nurses home across from Somerset Hospital, a six-storey office complex comprising four buildings in Green Point and a parking lot in Gardens.
It is unclear whether there are development offers on the table for these three properties.
Ndifuna Ukwazi’s head researcher Hopolang Selebalo said her organisation still hoped to put a stop to the school sale before the transfer process was concluded.
“Litigation is something we would consider, but it is not ideal. It’s a last port of call,” she said.
Ndifuna Ukwazi launched a campaign, Reclaim the city, 10 days ago – to call for the properties in question and other “surplus” city land, to be used for the benefit of the city’s working class, and not for profit.
“The city and the province lack political will to enforce existing laws and policy to bring poor and working class people back into the city,” Ndifuna Ukwazi said in a statement.
On the website of the Phyllis Jowell school, its deputy chairman of the board of governors Lance Katz said: “Expenditure of R135 million might raise eyebrows in what was regarded as an ageing community, but this demographic has been reversed over the past five to 10 years. The community here is not in decline.”
Ndifuna Ukwazi said Cape Town’s spatial injustice and inequality were being exacerbated by the misuse of well-located and suitable land for affordable housing.
When the province punted the properties to developers at an investors’ conference in March 2014, it said it preferred to lease the properties for 30 years, but that it would consider a once-off sale or longer leases for up to 60 years.
Ndifuna Ukwazi’s campaign, Selebalo said, extended beyond the four properties in question, and it was pushing Grant to place a moratorium on the sale of further properties in the CBD. “The city and the province are prioritising the interests of the private sector and predominantly white wealthy residents, entrenching apartheid planning, while unregulated rents and property prices are forcing the poor and the working class people out again,” Ndifuna Ukwazi said.
Grant’s spokesman Siphesihle Dube told the Cape Argus that some of Ndifuna Ukwazi’s concerns were addressed in a letter to their lawyers on Friday. But Dube said it would be inappropriate to share its contents with the media at this time.
Making her State of the Province address on Friday, Premier Helen Zille said the provincial government and the city were trying hard to overcome the spatial planning model entrenched by apartheid.
“Demand for affordable housing closer to the city bowl is an important priority for a functional city, and this can be achieved more effectively if the state complements the market mechanism appropriately,” she said.
But Zille also announced that the provincial government was looking to identify property that would allow MPs to live closer to the parliamentary precinct.
Selebalo said this left a bitter taste in the mouths of those who did not have the convenience of living closer to their places of work in the city.
Cape Argus