Bromwell Street, Woodstock.
The City has won its appeal against a high court order to provide emergency housing to Bromwell Street residents close to their current homes.
The 2021 Western Cape High Court ruling found the City’s emergency housing policy “unconstitutional'' and ordered it to make nearby temporary housing available to the 26 applicants.
Last week, the Supreme Court of Appeal set aside that order and upheld the City’s appeal with no order as to costs. The court also postponed the current residents’ eviction till the end of June and ordered the City to provide emergency housing before Tuesday May 30.
The judgment relates to a long-standing case between the Woodstock Hub developers, the City and Bromwell Street residents who were ordered to vacate their homes after the developers bought the property in 2016.
In a statement, the City said the applicants had demanded temporary emergency housing in the specific areas of Salt River, Woodstock or the inner City, rejecting all offers of temporary emergency housing made by the City at the time. This followed the high court granting an eviction order for a privately-owned property at Bromwell Street, Woodstock.
“Due to a scarcity of land and prohibitive costs, the City has a policy of delivering affordable social rental housing on the limited municipal-owned land available to it for housing within central Cape Town. This land is not earmarked for temporary emergency housing as the applicants demanded,” the statement said.
“The SCA agreed and found that the City was entitled to adapt its housing programme to address the effects of gentrification, among other challenges. It did so by identifying Woodstock, Salt River and the surrounds as areas to develop affordable social housing.”
Disha Govender, head of the Ndifuna Ukwazi Law Centre and the attorney for the Bromwell Street families, said that while setting aside the high court ruling, Judge Mabindla-Boqwana, of the Supreme Court of Appeal, still affirmed the City’s obligation to provide evictees facing homelessness with emergency accommodation “in a location as near as possible to where they currently reside”.
She said Judge Mabindla-Boqwana’s ruling also specifically recognised that the state was obliged to take positive action to meet the needs of those living in extreme conditions of poverty, homelessness or intolerably inadequate housing.
“Prior to the eviction order, residents of the Bromwell Street homes rented units for amounts ranging from R300 to R2000 per month before the properties were sold to Woodstock Hub. With the residents facing homelessness, the City was brought into the matter,” she said.
“The City initially denied it had any obligation to provide the residents with temporary emergency accommodation and only offered to relocate the evictees to Wolwerivier Incremental Development Area after the case was brought against it. This offer and the City’s subsequent offer of relocation to Kampies in Philippi were rejected by the residents for a number of reasons.”
Ms Govender said the City’s emergency housing programme continued to displace poor black, coloured and Indian people from well-located areas like Woodstock, Salt River and the inner-city to relocation camps where people languished in poverty and in unfamiliar and sometimes dangerous conditions.
“It replicates spatial apartheid, and, in the specific context of the state’s failure to provide affordable housing, check exorbitant rentals and properly plan for people facing evictions into homelessness, this is plainly unjust and retrogressive of the rights to housing and equitable access to land.”
Bromwell Street spokeswoman and lead applicant Charnell Commando said they had brought the case to set a precedent for the City, courts, landlords and those facing eviction. She said the SCA’s ruling did not consider the bigger aspects of the case and the reality of eviction where people's lives were affected in the process.
“It is so emotional and affects our daily lives. There are more and more people being forced out of our area. This is the life we know and where I have stayed my whole life with the people I know and love. Now they want to send us away from everything we know, where we are centrally located.”
Ms Commando said they feared the City might come back with the same offer of Kampies.
“We tried to help the City identify parcels of land we had seen vacant and empty for years, but the City said they could not use it. We engaged with them, but here we are still under eviction.”
Mayoral committee member for human settlements Malusi Booi said the new emergency housing locations for Bromwell Street residents would be under review based on the SCA order.