‘Gatvol’ residents expose DA

City’s apartheid housing remains an issue, writes

site only to prevent social housing.

As long as the working class continue to travel long distances to the inner city for work, they carry the cost of apartheid spatial planning, as it costs them more to get to work than the middle class, who live closer to business areas and the economic centres of the city.

Most poor families spend about 40% of their income on transport. Their children, often unsupervised for several hours each day, are at risk and robbed of family time as they spend many hours commuting.

Not satisfied with just denying first-time indigent applicants the opportunity to live in the city and surrounds through social housing, the DA has also created the conditions to force out many poor pensioners who have been living in areas such as Bo-Kaap, Woodstock and Salt River for decades.

They have done this by drastically increasing the rates and taxes, making it unaffordable for those who have owned their properties for generations to stay there any longer. Privatesector developers have drastically increased rentals for those who have been renting there for decades.

The local authorities have provided tax incentives to private developers to build high-rise loft apartments in the CBD and surrounds, artificially inflating the price of properties and making it impossible for young, black, up-andcoming professionals to buy there. Only speculative investors and young, white professionals with inherited wealth are able to afford homes in these areas.

They have used the poor to subsidise the rich, with rates being used to pay for private security and public transport in these rich, lily-white areas, further increasing the prices. The DA, in essence, has through its policies and programmes provided a deliberately designed, state-aided gentrification programme, making these historically white areas whiter.

Contrast this with the City of Johannesburg, where the ANC government demonstrated how the government can revitalise the inner city in an inclusive and integrated manner. While in Cape Town the poor have been dumped in farflung, newly created ghettos such as Blikkiesdorp, today the City of Johannesburg has the most innercity social housing in South Africa.

This includes flats for rental, hostels and rooms for new arrivals in the city, considering that people constantly gravitate to the cities.

Cape Town, on the other hand, has no special provisions for newcomers in the city, even though urbanisation is a reality.

If we want to avoid our city and province from falling apart, the DA government must move away from its archaic and exclusivist apartheid-style gentrification policy to a more modern and inclusive densification policy for the city.

There must be land audits for every municipality with district and municipal committees. We require a land release programme within the framework of our law and constitution while we debate how we overcome the original sin of dispossession .

The City must begin to implement the delivery of mixed housing options for mixed-income groups in the CBD and surrounds. It should also expand the economic opportunities of housing projects beyond private developers to include youth, women and co-operatives.

Improved living conditions will increase social cohesion, safety and wellness, provide an environment conducive to studying, promote a stable community and also has potential as a source of income through small, home-based business ventures. These are benefits for the greater good and they must take precedence over the privileged classes’ concerns about property values, which the DA protects at the poor’s expense.

We must reach our goals as enshrined in the Freedom Charter that the land shall be shared by those who work it and there shall be houses, security and comfort.

Jacobs is the ANC Western Cape provincial secretary