CAPE TOWN - Outgoing Cape Town Mayor Patricia de Lille on Thursday said the City of Cape Town has exceeded its housing delivery target by 62% in the last financial year and has budgeted more than R2 billion on new housing opportunities over the next three financial years.
“Between 2012 and 2018, over 42,000 housing opportunities were provided to the residents of Cape Town. In the past financial year -- for the first time in its 18-year history as a metro government -- we exceeded our housing delivery target by 62%. We must continue on this trend and we have set aside R2.1 billion on new housing opportunities over the next three financial years, with R590 million being budgeted for 2018/19 alone,” she said.
De Lille was addressing her last Cape Town City council meeting at the Council Chambers Civic Centre in Cape Town.
She said housing was one of the biggest challenges that the metro municipality had committed to address in order to ensure that qualifying residents were provided with housing opportunities.
“Mr Speaker, in terms of our commitment to redressing the imbalances of the past, under my leadership this caring City has ensured that residents who were previously denied property ownership can reclaim that right. The City has ramped up the handover of title deeds and we have issued over 16,000 deeds to beneficiaries since 2011,” said De Lille.
"As much as we have achieved over the past seven years, there is still a lot to do to bring greater parity of services. Local government is not just about delivering utility services such as water and electricity, it is responsible for much more. This is why we established the area-based service delivery model to make sure the services of all 10 City departments are landed in all areas in the city.”
According to De Lille, In 2011, at her first inauguration as Cape Town mayor, she told residents that she was determined to “work tirelessly, day and night, to live up to this vote of confidence to ensure that we do justice to the hopes, dreams and aspirations of all the citizens of our great city”.
“I became the mayor to serve people and not be served. As elected representatives, we must constantly give feedback and report to residents on what we have delivered and what we are still going to deliver because we are accountable in terms of the election promises we made,” she said.