Dear Mr Mayor,
I write to you as a resident and ratepayer of Cape Town. As a privileged South African, I live in a leafy suburb with wonderful service delivery. For goodness’ sake, last week there was planned maintenance done on a water pipe in my street and despite the notification of an interruption in service, my water flowed freely and the work was done in mere hours.
But, there are other Capetonians who do not share my privilege, despite also paying their rates. They live far from economic opportunities, spending over a third of their salaries just to get to work. They are crying out for affordable housing inside the city bowl, or in the surrounding suburbs.
I raise this point because I recently read that you could spend a minimum of R30m on a temporary, removable roof for Cape Town Stadium as part of a bid to secure a UFC Africa fight in the city.
Now I happen to know there is a plan with the amendments to the Municipal Planning Bylaw to densify many of Cape Town’s already dense suburbs, far from the CBD, to address the housing crisis all while the DA government in Cape Town and the Western Cape is fighting tooth and nail against the development of social and affordable housing at a site like Tafelberg in Sea Point, as an example.
My Mayor, I recognise the tourism and economic benefits hosting a Dricus du Plessis UFC fight in Cape Town — at Cape Town Stadium, no less — would offer the City of Cape Town. I also recognise there are other (already roofed) venues like the Good Hope Centre that could use some much-needed TLC (probably for less than a R30m investment) and would be able to benefit a greater portion of the population for a long time. But will R30m (minimum, remember) on a roof over Cape Town Stadium really be money well spent?
Cape Town has a housing crisis, with most residents completely priced out of the market — just drive past the Castle of Good Hope in the CBD, or St Peter’s Square in Observatory to see first-hand the level of desperation that has seen people set up entire communities of informal shelters on the sidewalk to home themselves. Instead of taking a draconian approach and destroying their goods and forcing them out, why not allocate more of my rates to the development of social housing?
Inclusive housing and spatial redress activists Ndifuna Ukwazi have this phenomenal tool that shows you exactly where you could build these affordable homes.
If Green Point, where the Cape Town Stadium is located, is where you want to spend some money, the City of Cape Town has eight parcels of land (1.2km²) there. In Sea Point, there are nine parcels of land totalling 16,722m². Bo Kaap’s nine parcels measure 242,301m². Even the City Bowl has 90,810m² of City land that could be developed.
My point is, Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis, that the City of Cape Town’s slogan used to be “This city works for you”. Many aggrieved residents of Cape Town, especially those on its outskirts where there are very few leaves in the suburbs, used to either say “This city works for who?” or “This city works for a few”. Today, that slogan is “Making progress possible”, and again, I need to question: “Possible for whomst?”
Because if spending R30m on a roof over Cape Town Stadium is progress, while hundreds of thousands of people continue to live in appalling conditions where there are no recreational spaces, raw sewage flowing next to their homes, or desperately far away from economic opportunities, then I think the City’s priorities are all wrong.
That R30m could be better spent elsewhere, Mr Mayor, and we all know it. We now know for sure a lack of funding isn’t the thing preventing the development of social housing, it’s a lack of will.
* Lance Witten is the Editor of IOL.