Zohran vs Geordin — Two sons of Cape Town, two very different mayors

Local government elections are still three months away, but here’s a purely notional election for you to take part in. So secret is the ballot, you can vote in your own head, and to keep it simple, we’ve chosen just two candidates for the post of mayor of Cape Town – Geordin Hill-Lewis vs Zohran Mamdani. 

The respective incumbents of New York City and Cape Town have a few things in common, and many differences. Let’s start with the similarities. Both are young – Mamdani is 34, Hill-Lewis is 39. Both had some schooling in Cape Town, with Hill-Lewis attending Edgemead High School and Mamdani spending a couple of years at St George’s Grammar School. Both are mayors of major cities that are economic powerhouses and major tourist destinations. Crucially, they’re both mayors of cities struggling under affordability crises.  

And that’s where the similarities between the two youthful mayors run out. While there are several election issues on which we could run a side-by-side comparison, let’s limit it to one of the most salient for both Cape Town and New York City: housing. 

New housing stock

Zohran Mamdani’s “block by block” proposal includes a $22-billion investment in affordable housing. The plan commits to building 200,000 affordable homes in the next 10 years and to preserving 200,000 more. Over the next two years, his office has committed to building 16,000 new apartments, with half going to lower-income households. 

Cape Town’s commitment to affordable housing is far less clear. The City’s documents talk about a “pipeline” of 12,000 affordable units close to the CBD. But the City and Western Cape received a smackdown in the Constitutional Court recently, where judges noted that the pipeline has been jammed for over a decade. The court ordered the City and Province to report back on their affordable housing pipeline and budget within three months. 

City-owned land 

On his first day in office, Mamdani signed an executive order creating LIFT, the Land Inventory Fast Track Task Force. LIFT will review all land within New York City’s control and design strategies for developing housing on appropriate sites. It will take a portfolio-wide approach to maximise housing and public services. 

The fact that this was among the NYC mayor’s first actions in office contrasts starkly with Hill-Lewis’s administration, which had to be forced to report to the Constitutional Court on its plans for affordable housing. It’s not a great look for Hill-Lewis’s administration that sites such as the Good Hope Centre and a large tract of City-owned land between Sea Point and Greenpoint are being sold to the highest bidders, with no plans for affordable housing. 

Inclusionary housing

Inclusionary housing is a policy tool cities use to encourage private developers to build a proportion of affordable units within their projects. In return for granting developers certain valuable, publicly owned rights – such as being allowed to build higher than standard regulations allow – the developers apportion some agreed-upon number of units for affordable housing.  

Mamdani’s administration launched the Affordable Housing Authority, whose executive director will report directly to the mayor. It will make use of faster delivery models, such as design-build contracting, in which single entities that combine architects and contractors take on the projects.  

The Western Cape developed a framework for an inclusionary housing policy a number of years ago. Stellenbosch implements inclusionary housing based on the Province’s framework, but Hill-Lewis’s administration has simply sidelined it. In the meantime, suburbs such as Sea Point on the Atlantic Seaboard have experienced a boom in new builds, but in the absence of an inclusionary housing policy, developers have not built a single affordable unit within these blocks.  

Rent stabilisation

One of Mamdani’s major campaign promises was to freeze the rent in New York City. On June 25, New York City’s Rent Guidelines Board voted to freeze rents on one- and two-year leases for about one million rent-stabilised apartments in the city.  

Forty percent of all rental apartments in NYC are rent-stabilised, with most occupied by lower- or middle-income earners (the median household income for renters in rent-stabilised units is two-thirds that of renters in market-related households). 

Hill-Lewis has stated a firm opposition to rent control, going so far as to write an op-ed on the subject. In it, he argues that rent caps and rent freezes result in a drop in available rental units, and that it disincentivises landlords from maintaining buildings. Other writers have critiqued GHL’s analysis as simplistic, ignoring the realities of a highly cartelised housing market. Even if rent control isn’t a silver bullet, they say, it’s a tool that shouldn’t be discounted because of neoliberal dogma.  

Transportation

The Constitutional Court wrote eloquently about transport in its recent judgment: “[…] the echoes of apartheid’s spatial planning continue to reverberate through its streets and suburbs. Every morning, thousands of Cape Town’s workers board buses, taxis and trains in the pre-dawn darkness, travelling for hours from the city’s periphery to its centre. Their daily journey is not just a commute – it is a living testament to the enduring legacy of spatial injustice that this case glaringly exposes before this court.” 

Hill-Lewis has been backpedalling over recent comments that “spatial apartheid” is “kind of propaganda language that is no longer rooted in reality”. Meanwhile, he’s allocated R114-million from the City’s Urban Mobility budget to build a wall along the N2 highway. It’s a project that’s been criticised as an attempt to hide poverty-stricken neighbourhoods from tourists travelling into the city from the airport – a recent Public Protector report says the City failed to provide constitutionally required basic services to residents in some of these areas. However ill-conceived the N2 wall is, we must acknowledge that the cost is a tiny fraction of the R4.5-billion budget allocated to the MyCiTi bus route expansion. 

Over in New York City, Mamdani campaigned on making bus transportation fast and free. His current plan aims to purchase 2,500 new buses by 2030, as well as rapid bus corridors for under-served neighbourhoods. While his free fares plan is coming up against some resistance in implementation, it remains a long-term goal, and a programme for discounted fares for lower-income residents is currently in effect. NYC’s commitments in capital and expense funding over the next five years totals nearly $900-million.  

Ambition 

This is where the real difference between our two candidates lies. Mamdani has ambitious goals, including lowering food costs, providing free childcare and increasing funding for libraries, parks and cultural institutions. We’ll see what he’s able to translate into real change – after all, he’s only been in office for seven months. Contrast that with Hill-Lewis’s five years in the mayor’s chair.  

But a guiding principle of Mamdani’s ambition has been to de-commodify housing, and to protect NYC residents. Hill-Lewis’s ambition seems to be to let the market do what it will with housing, and to protect capital. What’s more, Hill-Lewis’s colleagues in the Western Cape government recently sent R821-million’s worth of housing funding back to the National Treasury.  

Our vote

As local elections come nearer, Capetonians won’t have a choice between Mamdani and Hill-Lewis – more’s the pity. If it’s true that “everything depends on what the people are capable of wanting”, perhaps the example of Zohran Mamdani’s bold ambitions and early successes might have voters wanting more than the paltry offering of Hill-Lewis.   

Although Mamdani spent only a few brief years of his childhood in Cape Town, we’d still like to claim him as a son of the city. If he ever returned, perhaps he’d consider running for mayor? DM