Cape Town: Grassy Park families threatened with shack demolition, arrest

Press Alert
Tuesday 21 June 2007
11am

The Cape Town Anti-War Coalition condemns the latest intimidation of the four families in the Grassy Park area by the City of Cape Town.

We want to advise that we will work together to put up a strong resistance to any council attempts to remove four new families who have settled on the field in new shacks.

We fully support the right of the four families to move into the area. Some are single mothers. We do not see these families as law-breakers. The families have been on the council housing waiting list for years and should have been moved into proper housing by now.

The Council came yesterday and told the four families that they will be back in 24 hours to demolish their shacks and arrest the inhabitants.

The housing situation is absolutely desperate in Cape Town and has worsened every day since the City established the Happy Valley dumping ground, and decided on their policy of forcibly removing people there and providing them with “starter shack packs” of three sticks and a piece of heavy plastic. Now, wherever the City sees shacks, the first thoughts that come into their minds are of forced removal to the Happy Valley wasteland.

The racist City of Cape Town believes that all Black people deserve less than a dog kennel to live in since it neither provides houses, nor even doors and windows in the starter shack packs which are worse than living in a tent.

The state has a responsibility to provide housing. There are thousands of people in Cape Town living in shacks in informal settlements and in backyards. Their lives become more and more miserable by the day. When the poor move out of the backyards or the overcrowded informal settlements into vacant land it is not because they want to break the law but because they are desperate.

The government says they want to abolish informal settlements by 2014 but in Cape Town they are only demolishing the settlements that bother the suburban residents and act as an ‘eyesore’ for tourists. We refer to the City’s statements that people in Imizamo Yethu settlement in Hout Bay must go back to Eastern Cape, and to their plans to flatten the shacks of thousands of residents in Joe Slovo, Langa to make way for new expensive houses that nobody can afford to buy.

For comment call Raymond on 076 9154108 (Spokesperson for the 4 families)