For more than a year, I have watched the homeless situation in Plumstead with keen interest. Of particular concern is the situation at the top end of Gabriel Road, where the “breakup-and-remove-rebuild-and-return” strategy has been at work, with no permanent solution.
I have seen the homeless occupy that land. I have watched the City of Cape Town’s law enforcement arrive over and over to confiscate the homeless’ assets that they deem to be rubbish, only to have the homeless re-occupy the land a few hours later.
This scenario repeats itself all over the city. With the April rains arriving, it’s going to be a miserable six months for those without homes. Not that the other six months are any better.
Cape Town is the one city in South Africa where world-class solutions for homelessness can be designed. Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis’s December 2022 commitment to release various parcels of land to construct about 1 300 social housing units across the city is a progressive step.
At the heart of the human crisis in Cape Town is housing. Anyone who intends to fix the housing crisis in Cape Town, must at the same time, be brave enough to fix the history of housing in Cape Town.
From the early tensions between the Khoi and Dutch and British settlers about land, and on to apartheid legislation, indigenous people have always been subjected to “being accommodated” in a housing, political and economic plan in which their needs, aspirations and rights are not considerations of equal standing within that plan.
Cape Town needs a housing plan that aligns with the Constitutional declaration that our “freely elected public representatives … heal the divisions of the past and establish a society based on democratic values, social justice and fundamental human rights”.
The misalignment between politicians’ constitutional duty to heal the apartheid divisions and not to inflict more pain has been ignored for far too long.
Thirty years after the dawn of democracy, we are still subjected to housing strategies that “accommodate” indigenous people but do not include their rights and aspirations as a crucial part to any spatial development strategy.
To heal the divisions of the past, Cape Town needs a housing strategy that allows rich and poor, indigenous and all others, to live together in the same neighbourhoods.
Mixed housing opportunities in the same neighbourhoods should be the dominant feature of all future neighbourhood designs.
It is how we break the ethnic and racial strangleholds that our politics – and cultural lives – are trapped in. Cities that continue to design housing plans to “accommodate more black people, more coloured people, or more homeless people” are perpetuating apartheid philosophies and the reality of being a divided society.
I am tired of going to meals with people where I hear someone say, “I have actually never been to Mitchell’s Plain” or “I would so like to go to Langa one day”, as if that’s the place to see black and coloured people in their “natural habitat”.
If the government and private sector housing strategies do not result in the fixing of the history of housing in Cape Town, and indeed in all of South Africa, they will have missed the opportunity to “heal the divisions of the past and establish a society based on democratic values, social justice and fundamental human rights”.
Nowhere is this more visible across Cape Town than when the homeless are rounded up, their meagre assets treated as rubbish and confiscated without permission, and their place of abode destroyed.
Or when that misnamed concept of “low-cost housing” is built in another far-flung outpost of the city. We should be living next to each other, seeing each other, and learning from each other.
Cape Town has a brave mayor and deputy mayor. It has an experienced and capable Spatial Planning Team. Now is the time for them to match their bravery and experience to fix the history of housing.
* Lorenzo A. Davids.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
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