Media: Gateway residents ask Province to intervene

CAPE TOWN June 30 Sapa

Hundreds of residents of the flagship N2 Gateway housing project marched through central Cape Town on Tuesday to plead for Western Cape provincial government intervention in the project.

Chairman of the residents committee Luthando Ndabamba said they were unhappy at the way state housing developer Thubelisha homes was running the project. Though there were 704 units, Thubelisha had no office on the premises.

“If we have any complaints we have to go to the city centre,” he said.  “We won’t get help [there], they will refer us to places like Johannesburg. That’s not nice.”

He said there were structural defects and plumbing problems, and the 704 units in the complex were becoming havens for drug dealers. “Everything is just wrong in that complex,” he said.

N2 Gateway flats to March on Zille to demand community management and acceptable rents – Tuesday

AEC Press Release

On behalf of the N2 Gateway Phase 1 Flats (also known as Joe Slovo Phase 1)

 

Event: Residents of the N2 Gateway flats will march on Helen Zille to demand radical changes in the project’s management and normalization of rents

When: 11h00 on 30 June 2009

Where: from Keizersgracht to the provincial office of Helen Zille

Contact: Luthando 079 896 6126 at and Jimmy at 073 158 4835

NO TO EXORBITANT RENTS AT N2 GATEWAY! NORMALISE OUR RENTS!

NO TO MANAGEMENT FROM JOHANNESBURG! VOETSAK THUBELISHA!

WE WANT LOCAL MANAGEMENT UNDER OUR CONTROL!

Gateway housing project in a shambles

Bobby Jordan

Published:Nov 23, 2008

Source: The Times

Only five families out of an estimated 20000 shack dwellers from one of South Africa’s poorest settlements have been accommodated at the state’s flagship housing development built on their doorstep.

Meant to showcase the country’s progressive housing policy promoting racially integrated cities, phase one of the N2 Gateway project next to the Joe Slovo shack settlement in Cape Town is instead a monument to a losing battle against the national housing backlog.

EMPTY PROMISES: The N2 Gateway project in Cape Town has not delivered what it promised for thousands of shack dwellers Picture: ALON SKUY

More than 1000 families from Joe Slovo have been relocated to make way for the housing project, which to date consists of only 704 state rental apartments costing R600 to R1050 a month and about 3500 free houses 10km away in Delft on the outskirts of the city. This despite the government’s promise of 20000 free state Gateway houses by 2006.

The relocated shack dwellers now live in the new Delft houses or in under-serviced “temporary relocation areas”.

The remaining shack dwellers — about 3000 families — are challenging a High Court ruling ordering them to move to Delft so more free houses can be built where their shacks stand.

Construction of “bond market” houses has already begun for people earning between R3500 to R10000 a month next to Joe Slovo settlement.

Shack dwellers say they are being forced off their land without any guarantee of getting a new house.

Media: ‘There is no way I’ll go to starve and die in Delft’

21 August 2008
Anna Majavu

Source: Sowetan

This morning an important case comes before the Constitutional Court, involving 20,000 Cape Town residents whose informal settlement is set to be bulldozed.

State-owned company Thubelisha Homes (now bankrupt), Housing Minister Lindiwe Sisulu and Western Cape housing MEC were granted an eviction order on March 10 this year against occupants of the Joe Slovo informal settlement in Langa.

They argued that the residents must be moved to fibre-cement shacks in a “temporary relocation area” in Delft, about 20km away from the city. They said this was necessary so that they could continue building houses as part of the N2 Gateway housing programme. After the houses were built, they said, they would move the residents back.

The community quickly established though that most residents would be left in Delft, a place many describe as “God-forsaken”, which has no rail service, where crime is rife, schools are overcrowded and medical facilities dire. Delft is also not close to any suburb where people might find work.

Housing ministry spokesman Xolani Xundu agreed that “not everyone will come back” to Langa.

He told Sowetan that 1500 families will get free houses in Langa, and 45 bonded houses will be sold to the public. The bonded houses are unaffordable to 99 percent of the residents who are unemployed. And the community of 5000 families said they did not want 3500 families to be left behind in Delft’s temporary relocation area.

Joe Slovo task team leader Mzwanele Zulu said that all the families could be accommodated if the government built RDP houses or if they worked with the people to come up with a plan that suited everybody.

Xundu said: “People who did not relocate back to Langa would be housed in Delft. They would not be left in the lurch in the temporary relocation area.”

But these claims were contradicted by Ashraf Cassiem of the Delft Anti-Eviction Campaign.

He said that hundreds of people who voluntarily relocated to Delft from Khayelitsha were still languishing in the temporary relocation area seven years later.

Leon Goliath, a civil engineer at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology, found that the temporary relocation area was “unfit for human habitation”.  Goliath said the roofs of the temporary dwellings did not connect with the walls and the gaps “led to leaks and drafts, which was not good for health … and could be a fire hazard”.

He said that windows and doors did not have frames and residents have been forced to secure them to the walls with concrete.  “These chunks of concrete could fall off and injure someone. Without proper frames, how do you lock and secure your dwelling?” Goliath asked.

He also found traces of asbestos in the fibre-cement material.

AEC Press Release: N2 Gateway Residents Committee

27 March 2008 at 10:30am

LANGA, CAPE TOWN – Angry First Phase N2 Gateway Flats residents from Langa are calling on the media to attend their meeting tonight (27 March 2008) with the development company that funded Thubelisha Homes to build the defective flats they are staying in.

The meeting will take place at the Langa Sports Complex from 6:30pm – 8:30pm.

The N2 Gateway flats residents have been boycotting rent payments since June 2007, after the company failed to repair the massive defects in their flats. These defects included huge cracks in walls, and leaking roofs to the extent that rooms became unliveable and parents had to send their children away to live with extended family members. There was also a problem since the residents moved in, in September 2006 that anybody’s keys could open anyone else’s flats. The company refused to change the locks and the residents were spending a lot of money changing locks and repairing defects on these rental properties.

The Committee has tried to solve the current impasse by suggesting to the company that they pay a committment fee of between R250 and R690 per month for three months, in exchange for which they expect the company to repair all the flats to a liveable standard, and to change the management team. The current management team is useless, according to the N2 Gateway Residents Committee.

However, the company agreed to this in a small meeting but then when it came to reporting back to the community, they announced that they wanted a much higher amount. The community was not prepared to pay this, given that they will also pay back rental arrears once the flats have been repaired.

The N2 Gateway Residents Committee is angered that the company is not taking them seriously. The N2 Gateway Residents Committee has gone out of their way to solve problems that are not their responsibility. The community understood from the glossy newspaper adverts that this national flagship project was providing well built flats that were ready for occupation, and that all the tenants had to do was pay their rent and move in. However they soon saw that once again, the poor were being taken for a ride. As with all other low cost housing projects in the city, the developers made a huge profit by using cheap and substandard building materials and by cutting corners (i.e. not providing individual keys and locks for the flats), thereby showing their disrespect for poor and working class Black citizens.

The N2 Gateway Residents Committee also supports the Joe Slovo community, which is currently appealing against a forced removal court order handed down by Judge Hlophe.

For more information, please call Luthando Ndabambi, N2 Gateway Residents Committee Co-ordinator on 079 8966126