http://www.thetimes.co.za/PrintEdition/Article.aspx?id=890350
Gateway housing project in a shambles
Bobby Jordan Published:Nov 23, 2008
Only five families out of an estimated 20000 shack dwellers from one of South Africa’s poorest settlements have been accommodated at the state’s flagship housing development built on their doorstep.
Meant to showcase the country’s progressive housing policy promoting racially integrated cities, phase one of the N2 Gateway project next to the Joe Slovo shack settlement in Cape Town is instead a monument to a losing battle against the national housing backlog.
More than 1000 families from Joe Slovo have been relocated to make way for the housing project, which to date consists of only 704 state rental apartments costing R600 to R1050 a month and about 3500 free houses 10km away in Delft on the outskirts of the city. This despite the government’s promise of 20000 free state Gateway houses by 2006.
The relocated shack dwellers now live in the new Delft houses or in under-serviced “temporary relocation areas”.
The remaining shack dwellers — about 3000 families — are challenging a High Court ruling ordering them to move to Delft so more free houses can be built where their shacks stand.
Construction of “bond market” houses has already begun for people earning between R3500 to R10000 a month next to Joe Slovo settlement.
Shack dwellers say they are being forced off their land without any guarantee of getting a new house.
“What we’re seeing at Gateway is more people falling out of the plan than into it,” said Steve Kahanovitz from the Legal Resources Centre. “Our information in the court case is that less than five (applicants) from Joe Slovo have benefited.”
“We are excluded,” Mzwanele Zulu, chairman of the Joe Slovo Residents Committee, said. “People living in informal settlements cannot afford those houses.
But the national government insists that all shack dwellers on the housing list will be accommodated either in the third phase of subsidised N2 Gateway houses or at an alternative site.
It concedes there are major challenges for housing delivery.
Housing Ministry spokesman Marianne Merten said: “Regardless of the challenges, government remains on track to eradicate informal settlements by 2014 as undertaken in terms of the UN Millennium Development Goals. Shacks and informal settlements are no places to live in dignity, to raise families, where people have access to services like ambulances and the postman.”
But academics and development experts say the Gateway fiasco exposes a flawed housing delivery strategy.
“What we are doing is perpetuating the urban planning of the apartheid period,” said Professor Sampie Terreblanche of the University of Stellenbosch’s economics department.
The housing backlog in the Western Cape is growing by 12 000 to 18 000 a year – far more than the annual number of new state houses in that province
· Between 1996 and 2001 the number of shacks in Johannesburg increased by 36,451. Today, there are 209,381
· Despite lip service to the principle of creating integrated cities, inner-city evictions continue in Cape Town, Durban and Pretoria.
· Despite a countrywide roll-out of essential services such as water and electricity to poor areas, major metropolitan councils have begun cutting off services to shack settlements. Joburg and Durban are all embroiled in court cases stemming from cut-offs
· KZN has even passed its own slum-clearance law – which is being challenged in court
· Major housing developments like N2 Gateway are poorly managed and beset with dodgy building contractors. Thubelisha Homes, the state-appointed ‘housing support institution’ that appoints building contractors and collects rental at the Gateway apartments, has been a dismal failure, and received a tongue lashing from the Portfolio Committee on Housing
Meanwhile most of the 704 beneficiaries of the Gateway rental apartments have been served summons for refusing to pay rent. But they say the buildings are defective.The residents claim they will boycott payment until government fixes the cracks in their walls and floors
· Among the 5 000 families living in temporary Gateway accommodation waiting for accommodation, there are 1000 people who do not qualify for free state housing
Notwithstanding the many problems there was also praise this week for the national housing roll out. Since 1994 the government has built over 2.6 Million houses, providing shelter to about 10 million poor people. — the biggest housing roll-out of its kind worldwide and comparable only with social housing programmes in China and Singapore. Commentators said the problem was not with government’s impressive human rights policy – dubbed Breaking New Ground – but with implementation. They said provincial and local governments were perverting the original spirit of the Housing Act, which was partly pioneered by the late Joe Slovo, Ironically the residents of Joe Slovo shack settlement are now in court fighting to save their roofs.
“What you’re doing effectively is keeping poor out of the city –that’s very, very serious because this goes back to apartheid influx control,” said Professor Marie Huchzermeyer from Wits University. “If go back to the 1997 Housing Act it doesn’t talk about eradicating informal settlements. It talks about making land available to people so that they don’t have to invade land. It doesn’t talk about any forceful measures.”
One of SA’s top human-rights lawyers, Advocate Geoff Budlender, said: “Too many people in local, provincial and national government think that shacks are a problem and the solution is to demolish them, but one has to see shacks in a different light. They are a symptom of other problems –they are not themselves the problem.”
Housing Minister Lindiwe Sisulu has pleaded for a once-off R12 billion injection to help speed up housing delivery.