GOOD Statement by Brett Herron, GOOD Secretary-General & Member of Western Cape Parliament:
The GOOD Party welcomes the City of Cape Town’s announcement that it is considering developing the Civic Centre parking lot in the inner city to include an unknown quantity of affordable homes.
If the plans ever go ahead, the mixed-use development proposal will be considerably more palatable to ratepayers than the City’s recent disposal of another high-value asset, the Good Hope Centre, to an evangelical church.
It’s a big “if”, however. Over the past year or two, Cape Town has repeatedly trumpeted and re-trumpeted unfunded plans to develop affordable housing in the inner-city. Context is important: The City has yet to deliver the first such home in 32 years of the democratic era.
According to the mayor’s most recent announcement, the parking lot is part of a “broader land release pipeline of over 12,000 affordable housing units”.
While that sounds wonderful – as it’s meant to do as we head towards local government elections in November, the devil’s in the detail, which the City in its PR scrupulously (or unscrupulously) avoids.
How many affordable homes are envisaged in the mixed-use development of the Civic Centre parking lot? Will they be for rent or sale? Who will qualify to live in them? When will they be built?
The only details revealed are the essential political messaging: the development will include affordable housing, shops, offices, and public spaces; could attract an estimated R1.5 billion in private investment and create around 3,500 jobs; and generate significant long-term revenue for service delivery.
If the DA-led City government believes a series of announcements will alleviate the pressure it’s under to drop the rigid constraints of apartheid spatial planning and develop affordable homes in good areas, it is wrong.
The fact is that its model of “releasing land” is a cul-de-sac. Announcing projects and adding them to an unfunded pipeline doesn’t solve the affordable housing crisis; it is just a political spin. (So, too is the practise of announcing social housing projects that have no state subsidy funding).
Have the City and Western Cape governments conducted any assessments of the pace and prospects of bricks on the ground using its land release announcement model? Have they assessed their model against a model where the provincial government and City government retain public assets and act as developers themselves?
* In 2018, in my capacity as Mayco Member responsible for Transport & Urban Development in Cape Town, my proposal to develop the Civic Centre car park was shot down by the conservative majority in the DA caucus. Ultimately, the caucus’ disdain for mooted affordable housing developments in the inner-city led to the resignation of then-Mayor Patricia de Lille and the establishment of the GOOD Party.
GOOD Land Reform: The party supports fair land reform that respects property rights.
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