Brett Herron|Published
The GOOD Party has asked the national Minister and Director-General of the Department of Human Settlements to investigate the legality of Cape Town selling land bought with funds earmarked to house the poor without building any houses.
The Department has confirmed that it is probing the matter.
In 2017, while serving as the City of Cape Town's Mayoral Committee Member for Transport and Urban Development, I announced the purchase of the 72-hectare property in Milnerton called Annandale Farm to alleviate housing pressure on Dunoon.
Dunoon is one of the most overcrowded, under-serviced settlements in this city, and this land was close enough, big enough, available.
We funded the land acquisition with R162.6 million from the Urban Settlements Development Grant, a national grant that exists to fund the infrastructure needed to house the poor.
Dunoon remains radically overcrowded
The money was obtained from national government for the express purpose of housing poor people. Not for anyone else. Not to bolster the City’s bottom line. To house poor people.
Nine years later, not a single home has been built. Dunoon remains radically overcrowded, but the DA-run City is selling the land to a private developer, for a tidy profit, without any requirement to build any subsidised homes. Instead, the sale included reference to a non-binding “affordable housing” target.
Annandale Farm is what happens when a City stops pretending it cares about non-racialism, equity and justice.
It is not a technical lapse, a budgeting oversight, or an unfortunate but defensible trade-off. It is cruelty, dressed up in the language of “social value” and “strategic land release”.
The fact that the City is profiteering from land deals funded with poor peoples’ money represents a staggering ethical deficit; beyond the ethics, I have asked the Department of Human Settlements whether it is legal.
Families in Dunoon have spent the past nine years waiting for the promise of a dignified and functional neighbourhood that was never kept, while the City has quietly sweated the asset bought in their names and now chooses to cash in on a windfall of tens of millions of Rands.
The City calls it, “sound property management”.
Land is one of few resources that governments cannot manufacture more of. Once land is sold, it is gone - not just for this term of council, but permanently.
There is a defensible case for a municipality to dispose of land that genuinely has no conceivable public use. That is not what is happening here. Under Geordin Hill-Lewis, the DA-run City has tipped from selling what it doesn't need to selling off whatever it can.
It is treating public land as a balance sheet to be monetised rather than a finite, irreplaceable asset held in trust for people who are not born yet.
A council can reverse a bad policy but cannot un-sell land.
Massive housing backlog
The City's defenders will say that the sale includes a (non-binding) affordable housing component, and that City has a funding crisis for social housing to meet a backlog it did not create.
Surely, the fact that there is a massive housing backlog, with a shortage of funds to meet it, would require a half-caring City to use whatever funds it receives to actually build houses.
Where does the City propose that backyarders and shack dwellers in Dunoon should go if it sells land meant to accommodate them?
The truth is that the City doesn’t expect them to go anywhere. It expects them to continue rotting in Dunoon.
Nor is answering the question, “why didn't you house the poor on the land you bought to house the poor”, with “we're doing something else, somewhere else, for some of them”, a defensible argument.
Annandale is not an isolated decision. This City has been steadily disposing of public assets that belong to all of us, including:
- Good Hope Centre, a public events venue, sold outright;
- Bellville Velodrome, a competitive cycling facility used by national athletes, handed to a developer on a 50–60 year lease with cycling completely eliminated;
- A working community library in Camps Bay earmarked for sale to a developer who appears to own the mall next door; and
- Gilray Scout Camp in Grassy Park, where internal City correspondence exposes the City calling the site “a quick win as there are already developers who are interested,” years before the Scouts, who had used the land since the 1950s, gave any notice they might leave.
But Annandale is the most brutal symptom of the DA’s contempt for poor people. It wasn’t just public land, it was land bought with the poor's own grant money, for the poor's own relief.
I have lodged a PAIA appeal against the City's refusal to release the 2017 approval report and valuation with respect to Annandale, and I have written to the Minister and DG.
I will keep pushing until this land - bought for Dunoon, funded for Dunoon - either goes to Dunoon, or the City explains, in public and under oath if necessary, exactly why it didn't.
Cape Town likes to think of itself as well run.
Well-run cities do not sell the land they bought for their poorest residents to the highest bidder and call it policy.
They build the houses they promised.
* Herron, is GOOD Secretary-General & City of Cape Town Mayoral Candidate