Cape Town - Brenda Majivolo was one of the first people to move to Cape Town’s flagship housing project, the N2 Gateway, a decade ago.
She said she was paying R950 a month in rent, but stopped when water started trickling down her bedroom wall - and no-one could explain why.
“When the lady upstairs flushed her toilet the water came into mine. So I stopped paying.”
Beauty Mbekeni, a cashier at Woolworths, also has problems with damp walls.
Both walls in one of her rooms are wet and the paint is peeling off. She also stopped paying rent because the leak was never fixed despite repeated requests to the city.
“I like living here though. We look out for each other. But I’m not happy about the damp and the mould.”
Mbekeni used to live with her parents in Gugulethu.
She said crime had worsened over the past decade in the N2 Gateway complex.
“But nowhere is safe. People come in at night.”
Nomvuzo Sidinile, a Metrorail security guard, used to rent a backyard in Zone 4 in Langa before moving to the complex with her husband and young family.
“It’s a happy community for the most part. We borrow from each other when we need to but there have been a lot of skollies (thugs) around recently. Not so long ago they broke into three houses.”
She is not happy with the workmanship in the construction of her house.
“Look at this mould,” she said pointing to the ceiling in the bathroom.
“And the toilet is broken and it leaks water which runs into the bedroom.”
Bits of plaster are also coming off next to her front door.
She said people from the city had come to have a look.
“Sometimes they promise to fix things but mostly they say we are not paying rent anymore so we must fix it ourselves.”
The project, which was meant to clear shacks between Cape Town International Airport and the city, is a joint initiative between the national government, the provincial government and the city council.
It started in 2004, but there have been a number of setbacks including legal action and protests over beneficiaries.
An audit report in 2008 revealed widespread deficiencies in the planning, accounting, design and execution of the development.
It said at the time the project had not been managed “economically, efficiently and effectively”.
The N2 Gateway planned to provide 22 000 homes within six months.
This was later downgraded in 2007 to just over 16 000.
Earlier this week the Minister of Human Settlements, Lindiwe Sisulu said she was proud that more than 40 000 people had benefited from the project and had “decent shelter over their heads”.
Sisulu instructed the Housing Development Agency (HDA) to complete the remaining phases of the N2 Gateway Housing Project by 2019 or sooner.
She said she was happy that 14 000 housing units had been built and that the remaining 6 000 needed to be completed by that date.
The Cape Argus asked the city council how the project was going and what percentage of tenants were still paying rent after many had stopped because of the leaks.
They responded by referring the Cape Argus to the HDA who are the implementing agents on behalf of the Western Cape government.
Queries were also put to the government about whether the project was likely to be finished by 2019; a summary of what had been built to date and what still needed to be done, as well as what needed to be done about the standard of the buildings, particularly in Phase One.
Neither provincial government nor the HDA responded to queries at the time of going to press.
Cape Argus