On the eve of the FIFA World Cup, five families from Newfields Village in Hanover Park will challenge their eviction from the homes constructed and managed by Cape Town Community Housing Company (CTCHC) in Wynberg Magistrates Court at 9h00 on Thursday 10 June 2010. They will be joined by similarly affected families from across the city.
Between 1994 to 2000, CTCHC, a public-private partnership, built 2 400 low-cost housing units across Cape Town, but hiked the rent from R300 to R1500 per month after families moved in. The families went on a rent boycott and brought these complaints to the City of Cape Town, complaints which were confirmed through an audit by the National Home Builders’ Registration Council and followed by legal action against the original contractors.
Instead of willingly making repairs, CTCHC has let these units fall into slumlike conditions, while also ending the original rent-to-buy program and seeking to evict these and other families. Over the past nine years, these families have spent what little saving they have, first on repairing their homes, then on fighting to stay in their homes.
Like many others in the same situation across Cape Town, these five families simply wants to be able to honour the original agreement to access quality housing through their subsidy and pay-off the balance over four years with affordable rents. To press these concerns, they will be joined in court by families from other CTCHC villages in Hanover Park, Manenberg, Philippi, Mitchells Plain and Gugulethu.
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