Will the real City of Cape Town please stand up? Currently, those running the place that likes to think of itself as an Instagram post in waiting are sending mixed messages into the world.
Here’s mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis’ now infamous comment in an interview with Daily Maverick published on 13 October 2025: “When you say things like spatial apartheid and deliberate exclusion… I think that’s just kind of propaganda language that is no longer rooted in reality.”
Here’s the City’s Cape Town 2050 vision document: “Apartheid spatial planning has also resulted in our current inefficient spatial form characterised by insufficient density close to economic opportunities, commutes of longer than one hour and costly logistics, which is exacerbated by mono-functional zones resulting in unidirectional travel in and out of economic zones daily. This has an overall negative impact on the economy, therefore reducing job growth.”
And here’s the investor information document from the City for the sale of erf 2,187, Three Anchor Bay, a 4.5-hectare, City-owned site on the Atlantic Seaboard: “The City’s intent is to dispose of the site, which is surplus to municipal service requirements, to the open market in order to achieve the market value of the land.”
As well as being in control of Cape Town, the Democratic Alliance (DA) also governs the Western Cape — which has come out in support of resolving the housing crisis, especially around the contested Tafelberg site in Sea Point, in ways that aren’t evident in the City’s approach.
While the province has committed to providing housing at Tafelberg, albeit limited, the City has yet to provide a single unit on the Atlantic Seaboard. Neither are developers offered incentives to build inclusionary housing into their projects.
Location, location, location is the estate agent’s mantra. The City’s would seem to be developers, developers, developers. This differs from the province, which has at least shown a willingness to try to tackle the Atlantic Seaboard housing challenge.
Whatever their own position on social and affordable housing, DA donors and voters are within their rights to wonder what the party really thinks. Contradictions and inconsistencies are a red flag of uncertainty.
Spatial apartheid remains rudely alive
What is in no doubt is that spatial apartheid remains rudely alive and unacceptably real in Cape Town. Anyone in authority who claims it isn’t is either worryingly dishonest or dangerously arrogant. Or they think we’re stupid.
How many of the staff in many businesses along the Atlantic Seaboard are black or brown? Almost all of them. How many of them live in the area? Almost none.
Here’s why, courtesy of YIMBY (Yes In My Backyard) Seaboard, an organisation of Atlantic Seaboard residents and property owners concerned about the outsize influence of private developers on their neighbourhoods and the consequent lack of provision for social and affordable housing and spatial justice in Cape Town.
“Half of Capetonian households earn less than R20,700 per month, according to the StatsSA 2022/23 Income and Expenditure Survey,” YIMBY Seaboard wrote in a submission to the City on the sale of the Three Anchor Bay site. “Taking 30% of household income as the affordability measure for housing, half of Capetonians could afford a maximum of R6,900 per month in rental. Average rentals for a one-bedroom apartment in Sea Point, according to available estate agent data, are between R12,000 and R18,000, and most families would require larger spaces, which would translate to higher rentals (two-bed: R20,000 to R30,000; three-bed: R30,000+).”
A global jobs website, Indeed, says the average monthly salary for a restaurant waitron in Sea Point is R7,485. That’s R4,515 less than the lower end of the scale for renting a one-bedroom apartment in the area. And that’s only for rent.
That’s why, on any given evening, at an hour when Sea Point’s bars and restaurants should be in full swing, minibus taxis pull up outside to ferry the staff to their homes in other, cheaper, far-flung parts of the city.
Not long after the taxis leave, those bars and restaurants go dark.
That doesn’t happen in Barcelona, Melbourne or Buenos Aires. Cape Town is fooling itself if it thinks it is competing for tourists with cities in which more people are able to live closer to where they work.
These are places where you might bump into the barista from your favourite local espresso spot in the gym or the bookshop down the road. Or where the woman who cleans your home waves hello from the next table at that espresso spot. How often does that happen in Cape Town?
Different worlds
When you experience poor or indifferent service, maybe it’s because you and the provider of that service live in what might as well be different worlds. Why should they care that only one till is open at the supermarket, or rummage in the warehouse when your preferred brand of rooibos isn’t on the shelf?
They know they are never going to be able to afford to live in your world, and so to them it is nothing more than the place they must come to to earn a living. They know they are a means to an end, that their humanity goes unrecognised in this place. So why shouldn’t yours, also?
Nothing asks the question better than the disinterested face of that lone supermarket cashier in an otherwise silent row of tills, and to hell with how many customers are in the queue.
If you’re a tourist in Cape Town, maybe staying in one of the myriad Airbnb properties that are turning the Atlantic Seaboard into what Wes Anderson might make if he was into horror movies, you probably don’t care. But if you live there, year in, year out, and are seeing your community desecrated and desiccated by multiple demolitions to make way for buildings whose designs seem to have been inspired by cereal boxes that have been left out in the rain, you care a great deal.
Imagine a Sea Point where your neighbours are actually neighbours, not people who might stay for three days before they are replaced by others who might stay for three days. Or fewer.
Imagine a Sea Point that looks like its own distinct place, not an AI slop video of ever more new buildings.
Imagine a Sea Point not-for-profit but for people. In a better Cape Town, the staff at Posticino, Sea Point’s beloved, slightly worn, always warm and welcoming pizza and pasta joint, could end their shift with a head-clearing 350m walk to their apartments in Tafelberg; perhaps popping into a bar along the way for a nightcap.
That may yet be able to happen. If it does it would be the outcome of activist organisations like Reclaim the City and Ndifuna Ukwazi spending years dragging the relevant authorities kicking and screaming all the way to the Constitutional Court, which reserved judgment on the matter in February this year.
By then the Western Cape government had announced plans to convert 7,300 square metres of the Tafelberg site — less than half of the total of 15,900 square metres — into “mixed use, affordable housing and support services”. Would even that have happened had the province not had the country’s highest court bearing down on it? Probably not, as evidenced by the absence of provision for social and affordable housing in the City’s investor information document for the Three Anchor Bay site.
New National Party
It helps us understand the broader issues at play to remember that one of the DA’s founding pillars was the New National Party, which emerged from the ruins of the National Party, apartheid’s architects and enforcers. How is the DA not the fruit of this poisoned tree?
Small wonder the party struggles to see the wood of social and affordable housing for the trees of all that spatial apartheid, which means the affluent are able to deliberately exclude everyone else from their reality.
Good luck to them finding a restaurant kitchen open after 11pm, which may yet be the least of their problems. In our virulently viral capitalist society, you are only as equal as your bank balance allows. Couple that with the fact that affluence has a taste for its own flesh: if you aren’t rich enough, it will eat you alive.
What do we get from that unholy alliance of apartheid holdover ideology and free-market devotion? A “studio apartment” of 28 square metres for sale in one of those new awfulnesses on Main Road in Sea Point. The price? R2,5-million.
The real City of Cape Town is standing up. Because, at R89,286 per square metre, who can afford the space to sit down? DM