Mercury: Durban shuts door on housing applicants

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The Mercury 11/4/2008

Durban shuts door on housing applicants

Applications for soon-to-be-built council houses in Westville will not be rescheduled, despite Wednesday’s application process being cancelled when thousands of people stormed the makeshift council office.

Pandemonium broke out when people jumped the queue and forced their way into Turo Hall. Some were seen jumping over the fence and others cut through the fence with pliers. Minor injuries were reported.

The application process was cancelled, resulting in some people, who had queued from early Tuesday, not handing in their applications.

People were applying for houses at one of four low-to-middle income housing developments in Durban.

The houses, in Westville, KwaMashu, Newlands and Chatsworth, are valued from R180 000 to R750 000 and are aimed at people earning from R2 500 to R15 000 a month.

About 24 000 people queued at the four locations from long before applications opened at 9am on Wednesday.

Officials had planned for the Westville applications to take place at the civic centre, but it was found that the centre was double-booked and the process was moved to nearby Turo Hall.

Tempers flared as people forced their way to the front of the queue, and chaos ensued as people jumped over the fence to access the hall.

Some got in and obtained application documents, which they distributed to people outside the hall premises, further fuelling tensions.

Applications at Chatsworth were abandoned an hour early as people rushed to get to the front of the queue at the Montford Community Hall. Officials said the people who had caused the trouble at Westville had moved to Chatsworth once the Westville offices had closed.

Applications at the other two sites had proceeded without incident.

There was talk on Wednesday that the Westville applications would be re-advertised, but municipal housing department head Couglan Pather said on Thursday that enough applications, about 300, had been received at Westville and the other three locations.

“I am in the process of compiling a report on the application process. I will recommend that applications are not reopened, as we received enough applications. However, the council will make the final decision,” he said.

The DA, which blamed the council for the chaos at Westville, reacted with outrage to Pather’s statement.

Caucus leader John Steenhuisen said the decision, if taken, would be “extremely unfair” towards those who had followed instructions and had not disrupted proceedings.

“The chaos was a direct result of the council’s inability to plan properly and work through the logistics,” he said.

Referring to similar scenes in Newlands, when the first round of applications was cancelled on March 1, Steenhuisen said it was “appalling” that the council had not anticipated Wednesday’s events.

“It is not like the council did not know something like this could and would happen. Instead of remedying the situation and starting again, they abandoned it. Now they should start over,” he said.

The housing developments were thrust into the spotlight when the municipality said it would employ racial quotas in distributing the houses.

In areas dominated by one race group, other races would be allocated a high percentage of the houses. Opposition parties compared this with the “social engineering” applied by the apartheid government.

While the ANC said implementing the quotas would ensure that communities were not racially divided, it was clear on Wednesday that the demographics of the applications were not the same as the municipality’s racial targets.

While Pather admitted that the demographics in KwaMashu were “not as good as expected”, he said the racial mix was “quite good” at Newlands and Chatsworth. It was impossible to establish the mix at Westville because of the chaos there.

matthew.savides@inl.co.za

* This article was originally published on page 4 of The Mercury on April 11, 2008