The City of Cape Town must plough most of its funds into building 75,000 houses every year to drastically reduce Cape Town’s housing backlog, the Young Communist League (YCL) said.
In a memorandum to the council, the SA Communist Party youth wing said that,
if billions of rands could be allocated to build a stadium, the council could afford (to build) decent houses instead of the small ones built in areas such as Delft and Khayelitsha.
The memorandum was received by Dan Plato, mayoral committee member for housing, after a YCL protest march through Cape Town on Thursday.
The organisation claimed it represented the interests of working-class youth in the Western Cape and that most of them were homeless, lived in shacks or poorly built houses which were worse than those built under apartheid.
“The YCL demands decent housing, departure of apartheid spatial planning, further expansion of the N2 Gateway and the immediate stop to the building of ooVezinyawo houses,” the memorandum read. “These ooVezinyawo (meaning ’show your feet while sleeping’) houses are so tiny, people think they were built for a particular use and not for domicile. They remove the privacy and dignity of people.”
YCL Hout Bay branch secretary Lovers Magwala said many families struggled with overcrowding which resulted in domestic problems. “Our appeal is that the city and the national government build decent structures … The constant politicking between the council and provincial government does not interest us. One of our main concerns is that people get decent houses and service delivery takes place.”
Plato told the 57 marchers that the council was busy improving its services, such as (getting rid of) the bucket system and the general upgrading of informal settlements.
With reference to the Imizamo Yethu informal settlement in Hout Bay, he said processes were in place to deal with housing problems there, as well as in other areas.
“We have 240 informal settlements in Cape Town and we don’t want to single out specific informal settlements. We try to look at informal settlements in a holistic manner and want to deal with the problem holistically,” Plato said. - Cape Times
In a memorandum to the council, the SA Communist Party youth wing said that,
if billions of rands could be allocated to build a stadium, the council could afford (to build) decent houses instead of the small ones built in areas such as Delft and Khayelitsha.
The memorandum was received by Dan Plato, mayoral committee member for housing, after a YCL protest march through Cape Town on Thursday.
The organisation claimed it represented the interests of working-class youth in the Western Cape and that most of them were homeless, lived in shacks or poorly built houses which were worse than those built under apartheid.
“The YCL demands decent housing, departure of apartheid spatial planning, further expansion of the N2 Gateway and the immediate stop to the building of ooVezinyawo houses,” the memorandum read. “These ooVezinyawo (meaning ’show your feet while sleeping’) houses are so tiny, people think they were built for a particular use and not for domicile. They remove the privacy and dignity of people.”
YCL Hout Bay branch secretary Lovers Magwala said many families struggled with overcrowding which resulted in domestic problems. “Our appeal is that the city and the national government build decent structures … The constant politicking between the council and provincial government does not interest us. One of our main concerns is that people get decent houses and service delivery takes place.”
Plato told the 57 marchers that the council was busy improving its services, such as (getting rid of) the bucket system and the general upgrading of informal settlements.
With reference to the Imizamo Yethu informal settlement in Hout Bay, he said processes were in place to deal with housing problems there, as well as in other areas.
“We have 240 informal settlements in Cape Town and we don’t want to single out specific informal settlements. We try to look at informal settlements in a holistic manner and want to deal with the problem holistically,” Plato said. - Cape Times
No comments:
Post a Comment