Durban - The eThekwini Municipality has eradicated 17 of the 71 transit camps it had built for people who had to be relocated from their shacks for city infrastructure upgrades for the 2010 FIFA World Cup.
According to municipality, 71 “Temporary Residential Accommodation” with a total number of 10140 units were built within the City with the objective of attending to various disasters and to also relocate residents that were in the way of 2010 FIFA World Cup stadiums that were to be renovated.
Since then, a total number of 1905 of units has since been demolished.
“Since some units are used in a rotational basis, they remain operational,” the city said on its website.
“A balance of 8 235 families, for which relocation requires short-term, medium term and long-term interventions, depending on the number of units in the area, remain to be relocated”.
According to the city, families were relocated to various projects including the Cornubia Housing Development Project during the period of 2013 and 2018.
“This is part of a bigger vision by the eThekwini Municipality to eradicate its 45 remaining TRAs in the City. The City has several TRAs, which are an integral part of implementation for catalytic projects that require the relocation of residents, located throughout the municipal area. The temporary residences are mainly linked to housing projects and the Municipality has been able to minimize them where they are no longer required”.
The city said that originally, 25 families required short-term intervention, two of which have already been relocated to the Cornubia Housing Development Project and one has been approved for the MKVA programme.
Funding for the 22 remaining families was approved by the MEC for Human Settlements in May 2019.
The city said the transit camps being occupied will be demolished.
“For mid-term eradication, 10 TRAs are linked to projects which are currently at a planning stage. Currently, under long-term interventions, 18 TRAs are linked to projects in both planning and construction stages and the broader Cato Manor Precinct. By the end of the 2020/21 financial year, 500 families will have been allocated to houses”.
The figures come in light of a recent IOL report that revealed that the eThekwini Municipality has a backlog of more than 440 000 houses to build.
However, between 2016 and 2019, the managed to only build an average of 4 000 houses per annum.
This means at the current pace it is building homes, it would take the City more than 100 years to clear the backlog if it had include building the infrastructure around the houses.
According to the eThekwini Municipal Spatial Development Framework 2020- 2021, Durban had approximately 3.75 million persons living in some 950,000 dwellings and this was expected to increase to four million citizens by 2020, and to 4.4 million people by 2035.
IOL