Three decades after democracy, the majority of people of colour are unable to own or to rent property in central Cape Town areas like the CBD, Sea Point, Tamboerskloof, Gardens or Vredehoek.
A two-bedroom 80m2 flat in Sea Point can cost upwards of R3.5-million to buy, more than R26,000 per month to rent and renting just a room can cost you R10,000 per month or more. Almost 10 years ago, my husband and I, both people of colour, bought our first home, a small one-and-a-half-bedroom flat on Harrington Street in Gardens for R1.7-million. This was of course only possible because we were able to qualify for and secure a home loan.
Under apartheid a grand-aunt of mine and her family had been forcibly removed from Harrington Street which historically was in District Six. They were moved to Rylands where that family remains. I joked at the time of moving into our Harrington flat that “they tried to keep us out, but we made it back”.
As a society we often use humour to cope with our trauma in an effort to avoid deep despair. But there are times when what is needed is to confront the “ugly” head on. The current crisis of access to land and housing and failed urban land redistribution requires just that.
The “ugly” is that our city remains segregated along racial lines. Some may be tempted to deny this. One may even point to my own example of buying property to claim “people of colour can access land and housing”. However, my experience is the exception and not the rule.
Research by Ndifuna Ukwazi shows that only about 1.25% of Cape Town’s population of colour (the combined number of black, coloured and Indian households if we use the apartheid classifications) could afford a 55m2 two-bedroom apartment assuming a sale price of R2.3-million; 76% of Cape Town’s population earns below R22,000 per month and would struggle to secure a home loan of the required value.
Those in the lowest income brackets are earning 20% of that and spend 35% of their income on commuting costs (80% when adding the indirect and opportunity cost of commuting) and so have even less available for meeting their housing needs. There are very real people and families behind these statistics.
“Well, you must live where you can afford and that it’s up to you to pull yourself up by the bootstraps, work hard so you can afford to live where you want to.”
That is the capitalist rhetoric often used by our society, intimating that these families should just work harder, blaming the poor for their misfortune. This is usually coupled with an anecdotal example of an exception of someone being able to do this, the self-made miracle story.
The danger of this rhetoric is that it ignores the structural and systemic barriers that people of colour face, and is used to absolve oneself of the collective responsibility we bear in addressing these barriers. At its worst, this rhetoric has been used to pit people of colour against each other – the precarious middle class versus the poor and working class; the deserving poor versus the undeserving poor; the poor “black” versus the poor “coloured”; or the seen versus unseen poor.
Some may be tired of being reminded of our painful past, but until there is systemic change we must remember that our current injustices are by design.
It was with violent effort that the colonial and apartheid governments divided us in a way to keep us divided long after the demise of apartheid by corrupting our sense of being and belonging.
People of colour were removed from central Cape Town in a project to make the specific space “whites only”. The rights of people of colour to the land were made unrecognisable by a legal system that worked with the oppressive state to legalise the apartheid project of segregation and subjugation.
It created an abundance of land in central Cape Town at affordable prices for white people to own, and a scarcity of land for people of colour whose tenure was made insecure through displacement to the former Bantustans and coloured reserves.
Our grandfathers and grandmothers were rendered stateless. It impoverished the black and coloured majority of the city and created high levels of inequality with devastating and long-lasting consequences which we are forced to live with to this day.
This spatial apartheid and inequality was intentional and underscored by the racist ideologies that people of colour were less than whites, valuable only as labour and not entitled to rights to dignity, equality and freedom.
Constitutional democracy brought hope and promises of change. Yet, 30 years on, heading into our seventh democratic administration, there remains a dearth of affordable housing in central Cape Town. Access to central Cape Town for people of colour remains predominantly for labour.
Not a single affordable housing unit has been built in central Cape Town since democracy, with no real explanation why. How can there be redress and spatial justice without affordable housing as a means of accessing and returning to areas from which people of colour were so brutally excluded?
Through sustained struggle, housing activists over the past decade have applied public pressure on all levels of government, resulting in a change in the discourse on land, with particular emphasis on its social and transformative value.
Vacant and underused public land in the city has been mapped out, showing that well-located land is available to be used to build truly affordable housing, ranging from social to transitional housing.
Ndifuna Ukwazi recently published a report showing how three underused pieces of public land in the CBD could feasibly yield almost 1,000 social housing units, almost 1,000 market-related apartments and transitional housing. Acknowledging that the extent of the housing crisis cannot be solved with public land alone, better government regulation and inclusionary housing have also been called for.
In addition, I have seen everyday families who have struggled in the face of state failure, refuse to die on a housing waiting list and seek their own solutions to survive. Part of this complex struggle is poignantly captured in the Mother City documentary which recently premiered at the Encounters Film Festival.
Hard-won admissions from the government that there is an obligation to redress spatial apartheid and some commitments to use well-located public land for affordable housing have been secured through relentless activism.
Yet, there is still no acknowledgement of the significance of central Cape Town in the question of redress. This, coupled with the fact that to date not a single commitment made on land in central Cape Town has materialised into affordable housing, demands public accountability.
Where is the intentional political action to desegregate our city? We should not lose sight in this era of a renewed government of national unity that what is required is actual action to build unity in our city. We must confront the “ugly”. Spatial apartheid must be redressed, it must be intentionally undone. DM