Cape Town – Reclaim the City activists have followed up their protest at the Rondebosch Golf Course in March by staging a protest at the bowling greens in Green Point on Wednesday, demanding it be used for affordable housing.
While digging foundations and laying bricks, Reclaim the City tweeted: "On this Workers’ Day Reclaim the City members have taken over the Green Point Bowling Green.
"Deputy Mayor Ian Neilson promised affordable housing on this for workers who keep the City in business. We can’t wait any longer. We are digging the foundations ourselves today!"
The property, which includes two bowling greens, vacant fenced-off land and two clubhouses, is bigger than two soccer fields.
"Like in other cities throughout the world, it is the working class that has been forced to live in the outskirts and in inhumane conditions. It is through our labour that the City of Cape Town was built, and yet there is still no place for us," Reclaim the City said in a statement.
Video: David Ritchie/African News Agency (ANA)
“There's not one black development for domestic workers or for lower income housing in this whole Sea Point area and that has been going on for way to long," Reclaim the City told the SABC.
"The apartheid government has not done it, post-apartheid government has also failed workers and now we are saying we have to show the way we are saying that enough is enough.”
Last year May, Reclaim the City announced: "Yesterday in writing from Ian Neilson and today on Kieno Kammies, the City of Cape Town just committed to develop affordable housing on Rasta Dolophini Site in Green Point – formerly the unused Bowling Greens!"
Reclaim the City activists had called for the Rasta Dolophini Site to be developed to house lower-income people working in the city. The site of the former bowling green has been vacant since a fire in 2016 saw the closure of the bowling club.
Picture: David Ritchie/African News Agency (ANA)
According to the authors of the report "City Leases: Cape Town's Failure to Redistribute Land", released in March, there were no constraints to developing on the Green Point bowling greens.
"It is flat, large, well-located and clearly underused… A site of this size and in this location has good potential for cross-subsidisation… Affordable housing is desperately needed and the Green Point Bowling Green provides an excellent opportunity."
Reclaim the City said they held Neilson accountable for his "commitments made a year ago".
"He must do what he promised. Our constitution says that the state must use land, including its land for redress, transformation and addressing inequality.
"The city has failed to use its land to address this housing crisis. Promises have been made on several parcels of land in this city, and yet not one brick has been laid. Promises do not make homes."