Reclaim the City occupations prevented mass evictions, displacements
THE continued criminalisation and baseless claims made by the City on numerous occasions and recently in an article by Malusi Booi (Cape Argus, Monday, November 14) are harmful and senseless.
Reclaim the City would first like to clarify the difference between an occupation out of necessity and “building hijacking”, as Malusi dubbed it. The City of Cape Town can sit comfortably on empty buildings while the poor scramble for decent well-located affordable housing.
Let’s first clarify these two for Malusi and the City: building hijacking occurs when someone takes up a building in hopes to profit – like what the City calls “plot farming” – while our occupations have provided refuge to poor and working-class people who would have otherwise been evicted and displaced.
After years of gentrification in Woodstock and Salt River, many poor and working-class families that would otherwise have faced homelessness or displacement made a home at Cissie Gool House and Ahmed Kathrada House.
In 2019, the City started a process with Cissie Gool House residents to co-design the future of the occupation.
This meant they believed affordable housing could be developed at Cissie Gool House in a way that included us as part of the solution, rather than seeing us as an obstacle to be removed before affordable housing could be built. We worked with NGOs, City officials and City consultants to assess the structural issues of the buildings that we call home and started working on an alternative version for the future of Cissie Gool House that included us.
Later, in 2019, the City changed its mind completely and decided to abandon the process.
Every day for the past five years, we have worked hard to transform this abandoned and run-down building into a home for poor and working-class people who struggle for dignified and affordable housing by tackling issues of hunger in the occupation and to support the elderly, single women and children on the site.
Rather than label our occupations as criminal and places of hell, why not take a moment to understand the struggle for housing and the work being done by those whom you so wish to term as reckless?
Our entire city faces and is affected by a housing crisis. We ask again, why don’t you acknowledge and consult with the impacted people to find solutions so that you can see and know what the housing crisis and political moment is really about?
One of the root causes of this crisis is that the City has carried the baton from the days of apartheid by always prioritising the needs of the wealthy and white, at the expense of the basic housing needs of the poor.
This is shown in the countless ways in which laws and policies regarding issues of land and housing have always been conceptualised, made and implemented without the voices of those who are affected and badly impacted.
The Housing Indaba and the passing of the Unlawful Occupation By-law are just two of the many examples of this.
We call on Malusi Booi and his colleagues to do the work and engage with the residents of Cissie Gool House to look for an inclusive alternative rather than write short, baseless, untrue and lazy articles that further stigmatise people who are desperate for housing.