Promised Land. Karl Kemp
promised 70 per cent of the newly constructed homes (with the other 30 per cent going to backyarders from Langa). It later transpired that the housing to be built on the land on which they lived was to be rental and bonded – not subsidised, and therefore not affordable to them. A mass-action campaign ensued.
Meanwhile, a group of impoverished people from Delft, led by DA councillor Frank Martin, had proceeded to occupy many of the houses ostensibly being built for the Slovo community, claiming that if anyone in the area should receive subsidised housing there, it should be them. This led to an eviction that was so forceful that twenty people were hospitalised. Those who were evicted ended up with much the same problem as Irene Grootboom – they couldn’t return to their backyard shacks because these had already been rented out to others. And so two more squatter camps were formed – one along Symphony Way, a major thoroughfare in Delft, and another in tents provided by the city. The people in the tented camp were eventually moved into a TRA that came to be known as Blikkiesdorp (tin-can town) for its sea of metal shacks. Later, it came to resemble a post-apocalyptic refugee camp, and when the city attempted to move those who had settled at Symphony Way into Blikkiesdorp as well, they refused.
The mass action campaign by the Joe Slovo squatters continued apace. Controversial High Court judge John Hlophe ruled in their favour, and the matter was referred to the Constitutional Court. It delivered a famous and very long judgment in June 2009, holding that the government’s efforts to balance all competing interests were legitimate and legal, and allowed the eviction of the Joe Slovo squatters and their relocation to Delft to continue in staggered groups over ten months – though with guarantees that the TRAs in Delft were suitable and that the third phase of the Gateway project, which had by then already been initiated, allocate the promised 70 per cent of housing opportunities to them. The justice who wrote the main judgment was Zak Yacoob, who had also presided over the Irene Grootboom case.
Just a month prior to the judgment, the auditor-general released a report (which had actually been completed a year earlier) clearly evidencing mismanagement and a lack of due process on the part of the developers, specifically with regard to how the project was driven from the top down and disregarded the framework set out by housing legislation in terms of the different roles of government spheres in the implementation of such projects.
The N2 Gateway project’s implementation and subsequent failure have made international headlines on several occasions. It is perhaps the perfect microcosm of the housing-delivery situation in South Africa, and the fallout is an ever-wider dispersal of the patchwork housing common to the Flats. Today, places like Blikkiesdorp are just another part of the Flats, and the most you hear about them is when particularly gruesome crimes are committed there, which is frequently. The Joe Slovo settlement, meanwhile, has remained, subject to frequent land occupations, some of which are successful, some of which aren’t.
And yet, while the Cape Town metropole is perhaps one of the worst-affected areas in this regard, it is far from the only place cracking under pressure.
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