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In compliance with the Constitutional Court's order in the Tafelberg matter, the Premier of the Western Cape and the Mayor of Cape Town have filed reports under oath detailing progress (or lack thereof) in the delivery of affordable housing in well-located areas.

Read together, they show that nine years after the litigation began, neither government has completed a single affordable housing project in Cape Town's CBD, Salt River, Woodstock, Observatory or Sea Point.

Premier Alan Winde flatly reports: "There have however to date been no affordable housing projects completed in the CBD since 2017.”

Mayor Hill-Lewis tries to claim, “substantial progress”, but his political spin is unstitched by his own Addendum A, a site-by-site account of inner city property.

• Salt River Market, the City's furthest-advanced site, is at demolition and foundation stage. Construction of housing is "targeted for early 2027."
• Bloemhof Street, Pickwick Street and New Market Street had their original 2017 bidding processes cancelled in 2019. Seven years later, new consultants have been appointed but none of the sites have broken ground.
• Pine Road and Dillon Lane, social housing projects started in 2012, announced in 2017 with planned 2019 construction starts, have evidently been cancelled. This directly contradicts the City's previous public position in October 2021, when Mayco Member for Human Settlements described their status as "nearing construction phase." 
• Woodstock Hospital has been occupied by people in need of housing for 10 years. After five years of repeated studies, the City now says only that it is "investigating disposal strategies”.
• Upper Canterbury Street has been dropped from affordable housing altogether and moved into the general property disposal pipeline - this well-located public land will now be sold on the open market. This is at odds with the Concourt judgment requiring the City to take its Constitutional obligations seriously and be able to justify disposing of well-located public land rather than using it to advance spatial redress. 

Both Winde and Hill-Lewis blame insufficient national funding for their zero-sum delivery record. But the Constitutional Court anticipated this excuse and rejected it in advance. At paragraph 161, the Court held that budget constraints do not excuse inaction - they trigger further obligations to raise funding. Neither report shows evidence of such.

More pertinently, neither report explains why the Provincial and City governments are not using some of their own revenue, balance sheet, or reserves to supplement a national housing programme it says is inadequate. The Constitutional Court was explicit, at paragraph 7, that all three spheres of government - national, provincial and local - carry the obligation to address housing shortages, injustices and deficiencies. Neither the Province nor the City gets to treat its own balance sheet as off-limits while waiting for shrinking national grants.

The Tafelberg School case wasn't about money or process. It was about apartheid spatial redress and whether governments should be obliged to use their land and the resources to undo apartheid planning.

The reports confirm what this litigation has argued since 2017: Promise after promise of land releases and thousands of affordable homes to come - sometime. Or perhaps never.

The people who were promised housing in the inner city nine years ago must sit down and wait - again. 

Their governments have now put that failure in writing, under oath, before the highest court in the country.

Issued by GOOD Secretary-General Brett Herron