CATHERINE STONE

Market site. It is a struggle to find the patience to get a viable development right. The patience has effectively run out – that much is clear in the work of parties as diverse as Ndifuna Ukwazi and the Municipal Planning Tribunal.

As both the City and province commit themselves to making inner-city land available for the development of social rental – and navigate and negotiate the politics, bureaucracies, legalities, procedures and the public to get there – the Salt River Market redevelopment project is in the lead and perhaps, practically speaking, the only real project on the table.

Communicare is confident that it can build more than 750 to housing. Communicare’s proposals suggest bringing in high-quality, safe public space for everyone and neighbourhood shopping.

Some of the development will retreat to widen Bromwell Street into an open street for walking, cycling, parking and driving. The public realm will draw people one level up to an outdoor/indoor resource hub for tenants and broader neighbourhood residents alike. This space will be a place of safety, learning and opportunity.

These kinds of promise often fall by the wayside as developers struggle to get the numbers to stack up. Communicare is not depending on earning an income from this space to make it work.

What is now on the table is more than city planners could dare to have hoped. It is well located, integrated housing delivery at a density that we have not seen in Cape Town in the post-apartheid era.

It is the form of development we must embrace if a safe, convenient, affordable public transport system is going to be a reality. Perhaps most importantly, the viability of the plan is solid.

The yield of this scheme is sitting at 8.24%, with an internal rate of return of 16%. This starts to demonstrate a model that might be replicable on state land more widely.

But the Salt River Market redevelopment project still has to be built and that will not be before the middle of next year. To get there, and further, will require tenacity, dogged commitment and collaboration between the City of Cape

Town, Communicare and the community of Salt River, for the good of all Capetonians – who should rally behind this. Enough of the legal wrangling, policy dilemmas and objections. Let’s build!

Stone is the former director of spatial planning and urban design at the City of Cape

Town