Let’s not beat around Happy Valley’s bush

A PROPOSAL by the City of Cape Town to use the area commonly known as “Happy Valley” (currently an informal settlement) for low-cost housing has ruffled feathers in the upmarket suburbs along the R27 which surround it.

As Table View and the surrounding neighbourhoods have expanded, new arrivals have pressured the City to remove the informal settlement whose existence precedes the upmarket cluster homes that dot the landscape.

Plans to develop Happy Valley, or Erf 1117, for low-cost housing have been in the offing since at least 2013, but almost 10 years later nothing has happened as the area around it has developed.

Now it seems the Greater Tableview Action Forum (GTAF) is demanding that any low-cost housing plans be shelved, simply because the area cannot accommodate the poor.

Instead, the GTAF is demanding that Cape Town’s poor be housed closer to the City centre because another lowcost housing development in Blouberg will, to paraphrase the organisation’s spokesperson, simply perpetuate “apartment spatial planning”.

If ever there was a case for gas-lighting, this one is certainly it.

Let’s not beat around the bush, like we have seen with the River Club development, opponents are coming up with all manner of flimsy reasons to oppose developments that bring with them economic opportunities.

In this case, the poor of “Happy Valley” who have lived and worked in the area for close to 30 years should have no right to low-cost housing.

While the GTAF harps on about “apartheid spatial planning”, it’s exactly this attitude of blocking the poor from accessing well-located land close to economic opportunity which perpetuates the new apartheid.

Not far from “Happy Valley” is a gargantuan informal settlement that hardly makes headlines because it’s mostly out of sight. But for how long?

Cape Town, like Johannesburg and Durban, is growing at a rapid pace, and government’s failure to cater for the new arrivals into our cities means that we’re sitting on a ticking time bomb that can lead to an uprising.

For too many, our future is viewed through the prism of apartheid, particularly “separate development” – an actual misnomer because development is often sub-par and barely suitable for human habitation.