Housing lobby group Reclaim the City has urged Capetonians to take a stand against the displacement and lack of meaningful engagement as the public participation period for the disposal of Cissie Gool House (CGH) comes to a close on 31 January 2025.
Cissie Gool House, formerly the old Woodstock Hospital, has been a contentious site for the City of Cape Town which has gone to court to remove the occupiers.
The site was occupied in 2017 in protest against what they have called the “abject failure to deliver a single affordable home in the inner-city and surrounds since the dawn of democracy” by the City and Western Cape Government (who previously owned the site).
In October 2018, the Western Cape High Court granted the City an order interdicting and restraining Reclaim the City from ‘inciting persons to enter or be upon the property for the purpose of unlawfully occupying or invading’. This marked the start of sustaining the facility management and the City accelerating the planning for affordable housing.
The City plans for this site to be used as a mixed-use market and affordable housing development.
The total extent of the property, valued at approximately R87 million, includes a potential residential development yield of approximately 500 units, comprising open market and social housing, and will be disposed of subject to the provision of affordable housing.
The public participation process for comments on this redevelopment of the site was meant to end in October 2024 before being extended with the period for public comments now ending 31 January.
One of the CGH occupiers, and a leader for the Reclaim the City Woodstock chapter, Karen Hendricks said that about 900 people are set to be affected if the redevelopment goes ahead, and has urged people to take a stand against the displacement.
Hendricks said that most of the people that are living at CGH, have applied for state subsidised housing, and are on the City's housing database. She said many of them have been waiting for decades for state subsidised housing.
“The people that are affected are people who have moved into the occupation either through gentrification, through evictions, or because they could no longer afford to live in the inner city.
“The City is not saying what will happen to the occupiers if the site were to be disposed of. So they're not speaking about transitional housing, they're not speaking about what the alternative would be?
“And so for us, we know for a fact that what the city has been doing - where they evict tenants or they evict occupiers from City-occupied or City-rented homes - is that they have been allocating people to the peripheries of the city.”
The City has previously said that they would engage with the occupants, but have been called out by Reclaim the City and Ndifuna Ukwazi for having “not consulted residents on proposed solutions that could prevent significant displacement”.
“For the past few years, we have been reaching out to the city, or inviting the city, to engage with us around the development of the site. We have even gone in and as far as stating what we call a co-design process because the city in 2019 believed that the occupation could be developed with the current occupier,” Hendricks said.
“And so for us, it's quite frustrating that the city has taken this route...when they should have been meaningfully engaging with the affected and impacted occupiers.”
Hendricks said that the call from their side is for meaningful engagement during the public participation process.
“Secondly, we are not calling for an eviction or displacement. Thirdly, we are also calling for a development which includes the voices of the people. We are also calling for a development which is done part by part with the people that are affected and impacted, and so people can support in their comments.”
Mayco member for Human Settlements, Carl Pophaim had previously stated that the directorate has worked hard against many obstacles and complexities, “including the unlawful occupation and hijacking of the building, to move the project toward this point”.
“I will not allow narrow agendas and special interests to derail our efforts to provide accelerated, inclusive affordable housing in well-located areas near the Cape Town CBD as well as other well-located land in the metro’s urban centres”.
People can submit their comments to [email protected] and [email protected] by 31 January 2025.