The battle over
the Cape Town’s Tafelberg site in Sea Point appeared in the Constitutional
Court. After 373 years of land dispossession, the Tafelberg site at 355 on Main
Sea Point is just the beginning of making it right.
The 11th February was exactly 59
years that the District Six was declared a “white area” under the Group Areas
Act. Due to this forced removal it ignited one of the apartheid’s most
devastating waves of tearing families and communities apart.
Hathron said that there
is a failure of implementation.
The concern about
Tafelberg is not about the legislative or policy, but rather the implementation
of the policy itself. Although the policy is labelled as a failed policy the
decisions that were taken caused it to fail.
The City of Cape Town
as well as the Western Cape province. No evidence was shown to say that were
any housing infrastructure in Cape Town.
Pete Hathron says the
province failed to implement policies and only interacted between 2010 and
2017.
Since the 1980’s the
Tafelberg site in Sea Point has been deemed suitable for affordable housing and
a portion of it was used for a purpose until the last resident of that housing
was evicted in 2014.
The longstanding hope
and call since the closure of the Tafelberg School in 2010 was that the entire
site would be used for affordable housing to accommodate those in need.
The Tafeberg site is
ideal, a strategic site to redress the legacy of apartheid and improve the
lives of Sea Point workers who for many years were part of the community. Hathron
says the obligation of the legislation is to take serious measures. He also
highlights that there are a number of programmes in the pipeline for the
future.
The Good party’s
secretary general Brett Heron said The Good party supports the site’s
development for social housing.
The regulation in which
the restructure of housing was designated and is being overtaken by new zone.
Hathron says once land
is identified social housing will take place which may take place in the next
10-15 years due to a number of constraints.
Done by: Shaneca Cupido
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