Cape Town City Council votes to release land for affordable housing
On Wednesday the City gave the green light for the release of land in Brackenfell, Wesfleur and Belhar
Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis addresses the Cape Town City Council on Wednesday which voted to release land for affordable housing. Photo: Tori Newby
The Cape Town City Council voted to release land for over 660 affordable housing units on Wednesday.
The City will release 1,100m2 of land in Brackenfell, 3,800m2 in Wesfleur and 7,200m2 in Belhar. It will sell the land to housing developers at a discounted rate in exchange for the building of affordable housing units.
Earlier this month, the City released two currently-vacant properties in Ottery and Lansdowne to be developed for more than 680 social housing units.
“We are chipping away at the challenge and we are making serious inroads,” Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis said.
The Wesfleur and Belhar properties are located in areas close to public transport and schools, and will be designated for “gap housing” (for people who earn too much to qualify for housing subsidies but not enough to get a home loan).
The City hopes to deliver 116 gap housing units in Wesfleur and 400 in Belhar.
In Brackenfell, the properties will be allocated 30 gap housing units and 115 social housing units for people with low incomes.
Hill-Lewis said he hopes to see development on the properties within two years. The timeline for the completion of the projects is however “out of our hands”, he said, as it depends on the social housing companies receiving the necessary funding from the Social Housing Regulatory Authority (SHRA).
The mayor said he is meeting with SHRA soon to “unclog the drain” and “get the money flowing”.
“It’s a long process, but the key thing is to get it started,” Hill-Lewis said.
In the past two years, the City has released land for more than 4,200 affordable housing units, bringing the total number of units in the pipeline to about 12,000.
Earlier this month, the Council began a public participation project on a plan to release land for mixed-use developments and affordable housing on the Mowbray golf course.
This project will be rolled out in a phased approach, Hill-Lewis said, because it will be time-consuming and costly to build on the property as it does not have existing infrastructure.
Activists welcomes “step toward addressing spatial apartheid”
Housing activist groups Ndifuna Ukwazi and Reclaim the City responded positively, saying that for many years they had been advocating for the release of well-located land for affordable housing. “Today’s decision by the City Council marks a crucial step toward addressing spatial apartheid. We welcome this news and we hope that more land will be released and developed for well-located affordable housing.”
Next: No lifeline for teachers as Godongwana warns of “difficult trade-offs”
Previous: Rail: a Masterplan will only be ready by next year, says Ramaphosa
Letters
Dear Editor
This is the worst news ever! We as residents of Brackenfell have been actively contesting this and have had the previous attempt blocked. I cannot understand that this has been allowed. Does the meaning of the residents of the area whom are directly affected by this poor judgement not have a say in the matter?! Really!
The DA is going to lose all their votes in this area and it's going to spiral into more surrounding areas! This directly affects property values of people who have been living there for decades and will not lose return on investment as proven that property values in the direct vicinity will nosedive!
© 2024 GroundUp. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
You may republish this article, so long as you credit the authors and GroundUp, and do not change the text. Please include a link back to the original article.
We put an invisible pixel in the article so that we can count traffic to republishers. All analytics tools are solely on our servers. We do not give our logs to any third party. Logs are deleted after two weeks. We do not use any IP address identifying information except to count regional traffic. We are solely interested in counting hits, not tracking users. If you republish, please do not delete the invisible pixel.