GOOD Speech delivered during the interpellation debate on Affordable Housing by Brett Herron, GOOD Secretary-General & Member of the Western Cape Parliament:
Honourable Speaker,
This is an important conversation.
There are two essential elements to addressing our housing affordability crisis.
- Defining what “affordable” means; and
- Enforcing affordability and securing its perpetuity.
The Western Cape Provincial Government has done neither.
What it and its step-sisters in the City of Cape Town do rather well, instead, is make regular promises about affordable housing – without actually building any.
They mouth the word “affordability” as a political pacifier without even knowing what it means.
A good example is in the City of Cape Town amendments to its Municipal Planning By-Law, which labels a new zoning right “Affordable Rental Flats” without bothering to define what it considers affordable.
The simple answer to the Hon Lekker’s question is that the DA-led governments in the City and Province have no strategies to enable people in the ghettoes to access affordable houses close to areas of economic opportunity. If they did, they wouldn’t have sold the Good Hope Centre for a pittance to a Nigerian pastor.
The real state of play is that the Western Cape is developing fewer and fewer subsidised homes, that is, fully or partially subsidised; property prices on the open market are rising exponentially, and the exclusionary short-term rental market is booming.
While this is great for the rich, there’s no room in the equation for affordability.
If the provincial government gave a toss about affordable housing, it would have regulated what affordability means, how it is enforced, and how affordable units remain affordable and aren’t sold off to developers for gentrification.
Announcing the release of public land for “affordable” housing with none of these regulations in place is therefore purely performative.
In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Queen Gertrude delivers the immortal line: “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”
What it means is that over-insistence on a matter, such as the DA’s constant commitments on housing affordability, actually suggests they are lying or hiding the truth.
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