30 October 2024
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.
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.”