The De Waal Drive flats have a prominent place on Cape Town’s most iconic skyline – the one of the cityscape back dropped by Table Mountain. At the foot of Devils Peak, they rise old and fortress-like to shield the chic neighbourhood of Vredehoek from the still-undeveloped District Six below. It is a robust row of buildings, sheltering around ninety households – most of whom look back on lives of hardship unknowable to their wealthy mountainside neighbours. Yet, they have maintained (or gained) a position of unrivalled opportunity for low-income families in modern day Cape Town.

For many, this has been their home for decades. The flats, owned by the Western Cape Department of Human Settlements (WCDHS), have remained affordable via a rental scheme which charges households based on their individual income. This, in the face of rocketing properties prices and ongoing evictions of poor families by private landlords in other neighbourhoods — Zonnebloem, Woodstock, Salt River — close to the CBD.

From the Drive, poor families have access to good schools for their children and job opportunities for when those children graduate. There is safety, hospitals and the many amenities so desperately lacking in the Cape’s crowded townships and informal settlements. Their families and support networks — churches, mosques and friends groups — are nearby.

Through a recent policy turn in the national urban agenda, all spheres of government have concurred that more of this – more dense, mixed-income residential areas close to nodes of opportunity – is the key to transforming city spatial patterns inherited from apartheid. Sprawling metros with poverty traps on the periphery, are increasingly acknowledged as drivers of inequality, joblessness, poverty and economic stagnation.

Added to the practical advantages, the Drive’s tenants have an uninterrupted panoramic view of the harbour, the skyscrapers of the CBD and sunset over Signal Hill.

Today this prime property in one of the most lucrative real estate markets on the continent: property fit for the country’s economic elite. And, that is exactly how officials from the department now frame it as they go door-to-door to inform tenants that their relocation to a housing development on the urban periphery is imminent.

The house calls have been happening since Monday 18 May.

It is decided that it is no longer viable for us to receive the rent that we're currently charging, an official, who asked not to be named, explained during one such call last week. All the flats would be refurbished and tenants who can afford “market-related rentals” under a new lease agreement are welcome to stay on. If not, they have the option of relocating (and owning) a home in Pelican Park – a housing development in a poor area some 20 kilometres south of the city.

“So the judge cannot say we did not offer you an alternative,” the official added, an apparent reference to the big question for a magistrate during eviction proceedings — is there alternative accommodation.

To tenant Carol White’s protestations that a move to Pelican Park would spell disaster for her grandson entering matric next year, the response came:

“Ma’am, we all of have our problems. But, we wouldn’t get our job done if we were to consider everyone’s problems. Have you seen the views from around here? We all want to live close to the city. But, you can’t pay so little when people pay millions to be able to live around here. Just look at the views.”

Louis Verblun, a tenant and elected chairman for the Drive’s residents’ committee, believes this tactic intentionally isolates tenants from the group, and then intimidates them. For weeks he has requested a written explanation from the human settlements department, and lobbied against the house calls.

“There are many pensioners here and people who are vulnerable,” he said.

“Can you imagine how intimidating it must be to have officials arriving at your door after all the rumours that have been circulating? All alone like that, you stand no chance. For now, as we try to find out more, we’ve simply said – ‘do not sign anything’.”

In the panic that has accompanied the rumour mill, the committee has been soliciting donations towards a lawyer. Tenants who can’t afford the R200 contribution can help out by doing their bit in the kitchen for a cake sale, committee treasurer Margarita Loubser announced at a recent feedback meeting. No, she said, the free services of Legal Aid are not an option: “it’s our homes we are talking about, this is serious stuff”.

Yet, the foreboding message delivered to Carol White seems at odds with a response issued some weeks ago by Zalisile Mbali, spokesman for Human Settlements MEC Bonginkosi Madikizela. He said that lease agreements would only be terminated when tenants default on their payments going forward. Further requests for clarity via a meeting with the MEC or designated official have however been unsuccessful.

More so than the proposed rent hikes, it’s these divergent messages and lack of consultation with the tenants that lies at the heart of the confusion and panic. In fact, that any decision about the future of the flats was made and imposed without a substantial participation process involving the current tenants is legally problematic, says Sheldon Magardie, a housing lawyer and director of the Legal Resources Centre (LRC) in Cape Town.

It is the views from De Waal Drive, a testament to the value of the real estate, that often colours tenants’ understandings of why the department wants them out. But, speak to 54-year-old Fuad Isaacs at flat 82 and he lays claim to the panorama as much as people who paid millions to be there. One can imagine few people who will relish in the pinks and purples of sunset over Table Bay more than him.

His attention soon shifts from the skies, horizon and distant history to the rocky foreground below his backdoor. Here is where he finds true solace and meaning in the view.

As he speaks, he points here and there to the now non-existent street corners, girlfriends’ homes and rugby fields of his youth in District Six. He sends his eleven-year-old son to fetch a crumpled photograph of Windsor Street, before it was bulldozed, to show you the place of which he speaks. As with many stories of District Six (which exist only in the memories of those who saw it lost) it is an account that could go uninterrupted for hours.

“Finally, this home is my reward,” he would say, in reference to the Drive flat “given” to him on rental basis after years on government’s housing waiting list.

Isaacs’ family was one of the last to be removed from District Six – in September 1980. On the day that their furniture was hauled to Mitchells Plain, he bluntly refused to help his parents pack up. He watched as the truck and family left without him. So begun years of squatting from friend to friend and homeless rambling – on the fringes of the hillside and rubble that was once his home and below the radar of the state.

“I am from this city. We are the indigenes, much more so than people who came later. No matter if they have money or not. I care nothing for the Cape Flats. My parents were okay, because they were older and found all their friends in Mitchells Plain, yes. But, I was a young man. There was nothing for me out there. My everything was here,” he says.

The trauma of those evictions and the same defiance he felt towards them re-emerges as he speaks of the new government’s plans to do the same to his own family, as what was done to his parents. This the rightful place, for him and his children, he says.

At the time of those removals, the De Waal Drive flats were spared, ostensibly to house poorer white households already living there or displaced by the demolitions. Judith and Ralph Pace, now in their mid-70s, are one such couple who were evicted from the multi-racial neighbourhood below to the Drive. They have lived here since 1970. Most of those original tenants, formerly employed in low-income jobs protected under apartheid, are state pensioners now. The Pace’s monthly income, R2800 for two state pension grants, will be enough to cover about half of the rent expected by the department for their home in the near future.

As older tenants passed away or the flats became otherwise vacant, families on government’s housing waiting list benefited from income-related rental agreements with the Western Cape Government. Many, like Isaacs’, have histories in District Six. Also in the fray are evictees from other state properties, like Liena Mohanlall who was evicted from Sea Point eleven years ago. Others are housing list beneficiaries from further afield, like Peter Dias who moved to the Drive from Strandfontein (which, incidentally, is adjacent to Pelican Park).

Dias’ flat, number 77, is sparsely furnished and meticulously tidy. It’s the middle of a weekday and he’s home alone, playing RnB from a second or third generation CD player. He’s only been here with his family for eleven months. For him moving from Strandfontein was an escape from a gang-ridden area where street violence and muggings are commonplace.

“It was dangerous and cost so much to travel anywhere to look for a job,” he says. “I am unemployed. But, my son has a job and he can walk to work from here. My daughter is pregnant and the hospital is right around the corner. I waited thirty odd years for this - my entire adult life. And what now? It’s not even been a year, the department wants to move us right back to where we came from.”

For housing and spatial justice activists more systemic questions remain. What, outside of the rumour mill and divergent narratives, are the real plans for De Waal Drive and its tenants? Why, if not motivated exclusively by a business model and the value of the land, would there be a decision on new rentals that would permanently exclude low-income families from the precinct? And, can such proposals be reconciled with the state’s long term vision for class integration in Cape Town, and South Africa’s cities as a whole?

Written by Daneel Knoetze, the Urban Land Justice researcher at Ndifuna Ukwazi and a freelance journalist. GroundUp

Views expressed are not necessarily GroundUp's.