The City of Cape Town cannot allow mismanagement and flagrant human rights abuses to take hold in its Pickwick Transitional Housing project in Salt River.
Several site visits by GOOD City of Cape Town councillors Axolile Notywala and Roscoe Palm have witnessed the shocking state of affairs, for which we have voluminous documentation.
• Residents had been arbitrarily detained or locked out of their place of residence. Illegal evictions at the discretion of security guards and facility managers were being carried out in clear contravention of the Prevention of Illegal Eviction (PIE) act.
• Even more shockingly, many residents are forced into marriage in order to stay in the facility close to family, friends and children. Visitors, including long-term partners and family, may not stay for longer than 10 days. GOOD has established that several couples have been married under duress to stay there. This echoes the darkest apartheid practices where people evicted from Cato Manor in the 1950s were forced into marriage in order to get houses in KwaMashu.
• City Services that are supposed to be rendered at the facility, such as social services and occupational therapy, are absent save for the bare minimum of box-ticking exercises.
• Complaints about lack of maintenance in the facility have also been registered with us.
The City of Cape Town’s failures and actions in this facility are illegal and unconstitutional. The Constitutional Court, in a similar case brought before it in 2017: Dladla and Another vs City of Johannesburg and Others, held that lockout and family separation rules of a temporary emergency housing accommodation provided by the city of Johannesburg were violating constitutional rights to dignity, privacy, and freedom and security of the person.
Pickwick is a broken promise of the City of Cape Town laid bare for the entire country to see. Its history dates back to 2018, when then Mayco Member for Human Settlements Brett Herron identified it as transitional housing for the residents of Pine Road. They were relocated to the Pickwick Transitional Housing in order to allow construction of the Pine Road Social Housing to commence. The real tragedy is that people have been living in transitional housing for nearly seven years – and there is no sign of housing being developed on the Pine Road site.
These residents were promised that transitional housing would be just that – transitional. The stasis caused by the City of Cape Town’s dithering in actually building social housing in well-located areas has now resulted in the trampling on the rights of the residents, by omission and commission.
Attempts by employees and security officers of the management company to block lawful oversight by City of Cape Town councillors is deeply troubling. To this end, we have laid a charge with the South African Police Services to investigate the unlawful impediment of the business of City of Cape Town councillors.
Following our visit, we acknowledge the steps taken by the management company to defuse tensions within the facility.
The future of this project is critical to address the housing shortages of well-located land in or close to the inner City. That’s why GOOD will be meeting with officials from the Human Settlements directorate of the City of Cape Town, including the MMC Carl Pophaim and the management company.
MMC for Human Settlements Carl Pophaim must now intervene, collaborate, and authenticate. A lack of clear action in correcting the abuses at this facility is indicative that the City is collapsing its promise to deliver housing by letting this project fall into ruin.
The residents of Pickwick were made these promises by the City. The residents have kept their word. The City has not. Instead, residents are having to fend for themselves against wanton and arbitrary abuse on a daily basis, with no clarity as to when they would ever transition out of this transitional housing facility that is, at times, run like a prison.
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