D-Day for Public Comment on Plans for Old Woodstock Hospital Site

Reclaim the City members and people living at the old Woodstock Hospital picketed outside the Civic Centre in Cape Town on Friday.

Scores of Reclaim the City supporters picketed on the steps outside the Civic Centre in Cape Town on Friday morning. They handed in written comments on the proposed plan for the old Woodstock Hospital.

It was the final day for public comment on the proposed sale of the property to a developer. While the plan is for social housing to be built at the site, people living in the building argue that the sale would not be in their best interest.

The City of Cape Town plans for the four- to five-storey development to have 500 residential units, some of which will be subsidised social housing.

The old Woodstock Hospital, called Cissie Gool House its residents, has been unlawfully occupied since 2017.

Resident and Reclaim the City leader, Karen Hendricks, said, “We want an inclusive development that is not going to displace any of us. Cissie Gool House has been the only housing alternative in this city.

“When we occupied Cissie Gool House, we did it as a protest of the sale of the Tafelberg site.”

The number of people in the occupation has grown from a handful in 2017 to nearly a thousand.

Many of the people living at the occupation, she said, had been displaced from homes in Woodstock and surrounding areas – which they had been living in for decades.

Buhle Booi of housing movement Ndifuna Ukwazi said, “We want the City to look at occupations differently. There is an assumption that [occupiers] are criminals. We are not criminals. We are occupying because the City and government are not providing housing for people.”

Andre Louw, of the City’s public participation unit, came outside to accept the group’s submissions. He promised to give them feedback in several days.

A letter, signed by more than 1,000 people, called on the City to release a 2019 report on the hospital site. They also called for the public participation period to be extended again. This followed a community meeting earlier this month. According to the letter the report “was part of a larger process of reimagining and co-designing the hospital site”.

GroundUp has also seen a request under the Promotion of Access to Information Act for the release of the 2019 report.

Karen Hendricks, of Reclaim the City, addressed the group outside the Civic Centre on Friday morning.

Meanwhile, speaking at the Cape Town Press Club last week, Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis, said, “The City intended to develop [the hospital] into social housing. In South Africa, if you want to remove anyone, you have to offer them alternative places to live. That alternative, according to various court judgments, cannot be a distant location.

“It’s near impossible for the City to process an eviction order because we would have to accommodate those people that way. It puts the City in a bit of a stalemate,” he said.

“They are illegal occupants, that doesn’t mean that they are all necessarily bad people. Some of them have had very challenging life circumstances that have given rise to them being there,” he added.

Mayco member for human settlements, Carl Pophaim, said, “We’ve been clear about our intention to garner meaningful, feasible and constructive input on the proposed vision for this site, which includes the development of affordable housing opportunities for qualifying residents. The statutory written phase of the public participation period has been conducted over four months in total, which is a considerable period for input which exceeds the statutory required 30 days.”

Pophaim said the property, valued at approximately R87-million, including a potential residential development yield of approximately 500 units, “will be disposed of subject to the provision of affordable housing”.

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