DA’s Cape Town record under fire

Not even one project done, opposition parties say

ANC and GOOD leaders lambasted the DA’s track record on inner-city housing for poor Capetonians on Wednesday as they campaign to end DA control of the metropolitan council in the November 1 municipal elections. ANC Western Cape election campaign manager Cameron Dugmore said in a webinar organised by the Daily Maverick that Cape Town is a divided city of haves and have-nots.

ANC and GOOD leaders lambasted the DA’s track record on inner city housing for poor Capetonians on Wednesday as they campaign to end DA control of the metropolitan council in the municipal elections on November 1.

Cape Town’s continued spatial apartheid separating rich white suburbs from poor African and coloured areas remains stark after more than 20 years of democracy. Poor communities live far from inner city areas and use often unreliable transport to get to work.

ANC Western Cape election campaign manager Cameron Dugmore said in a webinar organised by the Daily Maverick, which included DA mayoral candidate Gordin Hill-Lewis and GOOD Party mayoral candidate Brett Herron, that Cape Town was a divided city of haves and have-nots. He said this worsened under DA rule with lack of services in poorer communities.

Dugmore accused the DAcontrolled metropolitan council of failing for 15 years to develop a single piece of inner city land for integrated housing.

An ANC government in Cape Town would release public land and stop selling it to private developers as the DA had done for years, he said. The DA government also failed to use money allocated to it by the national government to upgrade informal settlements, he said.

“The DA is funded by developers who want it to do certain things and not others,” Dugmore said. “The problem really is the DA, the lack of political will and the fact that they serve particular interests and not those who would benefit from reversing apartheid spatial planning.”

Dugmore said the city of Johannesburg had done “immense” work in making affordable housing available in the inner city.

The ANC would disclose its list of all its mayoral candidates around the country only after a vetting process about a week after the November 1 elections, he said.

Herron said he and other GOOD members fell out with DA leaders in 2018 on making public land available for affordable housing.

The DA’s track record

showed no inner city, affordable housing developments. The problem with big publichousing projects on the outskirts of the city was that they perpetuated apartheid spatial legacy, Herron said.

Hill-Lewis defended his party’s track record, blaming lack of inner city housing development on the government’s failure to release large tracts of land for housing development.

He committed a DA government in Cape Town under his leadership to release welllocated city land faster for affordable housing. The national government owned 72 times more land in the inner city than all city-owned parcels of land combined. The government owned five pieces of unnecessary military land, he said.

The DA had asked for the release of the Acacia Park development as it already has houses, a railway station, schools and parks, said Hill-Lewis. But public works & infrastructure minister Patricia de Lille, who is leader of GOOD, had not done so.

Hill-Lewis told Business Day after the webinar that the point was that pieces of land at the city’s disposal “are puny in comparison to the gigantic pieces of land that national government owns. It has to be both, it can’t be either/or. I’ll do my part but will they do theirs?”

He denied the DA record of housing provision outside the inner city was poor. The city had 57,000 social housing units in Cape Town with 6,500 under development.

“We have more social housing in Cape Town per capita than New York City, a city with many, many times the size of our budget. It is not as if there has been no delivery ... the issue is welllocated land in the inner city.”

Hill-Lewis said that with decline in budget of the national department of human settlements the age of state subsidised housing construction was coming to an end. “So it is clear that we are increasingly going to rely on the private sector to deliver more affordable housing.”