GOOD Statementby Brett Herron, GOOD Secretary-General & City of Cape Town Mayoral Candidate:
The City of Cape Town must stop hiding behind its alleged Good Hope Centre auction review process, swallow its pride, cancel the ridiculously inappropriate sale, pay whatever penalties are due, and publicly commit to using the precinct as a mixed-use development including affordable housing.
Prior to auctioning the iconic inner-city venue, the City described the sale as “a strategic move aimed at unlocking its immense economic potential, revitalising the broader precinct, and leveraging private-sector investments to boost job creation and economic growth”.
Immediately after the auction, however, there was a public outcry over the sale of the venue to an evangelical church for a paltry R135m.
To hide its embarrassment without admitting it’s stupidity, the City announced the sale would not be final until it was subjected to a review.
That was four months ago, and the City appears to have been in hiding ever since.
Cape Town’s public assets belong to its people. The City has a housing backlog of more than 600 000 dwellings. Although it regularly makes announcements about developing affordable homes in the inner-city, not a single such home has been developed since the advent of democracy in 1994.
Developing the Good Hope Centre to include an affordable housing component won’t solve the City’s housing crisis on its own but will signal that Cape Town is finally turning its back on apartheid spatial planning.
Just before the auction, the City spent Millions of Rands on repairing/maintaining the Good Hope Centre. Now, we assume that the City will have to incur costs in order to extract itself from the auction sale.
While all of this has the stench of wasteful expenditure about it, losses can be recouped through an appropriate Good Hope Centre development deal – and the City’s auditors will doubtless find a work-around to avoid blemishes to its audit results.
Most important, a valuable public asset of significant scale in a well-located area of the City will become re-available for development for public good – as it should be.
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