Cape Town - The remaining residents of Bromwell Street in Woodstock are staying put after the Supreme Court of Appeal in Bloemfontein reserved judgment in their eviction case against the City. It is not clear when the Appeal Court will give its ruling.
In an earlier high court judgment, the City was compelled to provide alternative accommodation to evicted Bromwell Street residents, who lost their homes after the properties were bought by the Woodstock Hub.
In September, last year the Western Cape High Court ruled the City’s emergency housing programme and implementation unconstitutional, and ordered it to make available temporary housing to the 26 applicants in an area close to where they live. The court gave the City 12 months to effect this.
The residents were served with an eviction order in 2016 by the Woodstock Hub after it bought properties on 120 to 128 Bromwell Street which would potentially displace more than 20 families.
Since then more than 10 families have been evicted, with most scattered around the Cape Flats, and others occupying the old Woodstock Hospital, now Cissie Gool House.
Almost six years later there are six families left, fighting the City to give them temporary emergency accommodation or transitional housing.
When the Cape Argus visited the residents on Monday, they were anxiously awaiting the court outcome, which they said would change their lives, regardless of whom it favours.
Roseline Smith, the daughter of the oldest resident Brenda Smith who died at the age of 80 years, said the remaining families refused to move for the sake of their children and the proximity to health, educational facilities, and job opportunities available in the inner city.
Smith said the area where the City wanted to move them had no facilities and was far from the inner city.
Another resident Faiza Fischer said Bromwell Street was their home and that should they be unsuccessful, the evictions would break down their close knight community. Fischer said all the residents were eligible for social housing and had been in the housing database for years.
According to the residents’ court papers, the City in 2019 initially offered emergency accommodation in Maitland which was later objected to by the receiving community, who were advised by the City that other accommodation could be made available at a site called Kampies outside Uitsig, which the residents also rejected.
The residents through its legal representative Sheldon Magardie argue that the City’s approach to housing in the immediate inner-city area and surrounds is exclusively focused on the provision of social housing, and not emergency housing.
They said the City’s appeal was without merit and that the high court correctly found that its emergency housing programme and implementation was unreasonable and unconstitutional in that its discriminatory, inflexible formulation and implementation failed to respond to the short-term emergency housing needs of the inner-city residents who were evicted and face homelessness.
The City said it was concerned that the high court judgment sets an unsustainable precedent for the state to accommodate persons – whether in a public or private eviction – near the relevant unlawful occupation.
The City said the state had neither the resources nor the land available to comply with such a precedent, which it said would impede existing housing development plans across the metro.
Furthermore, the City said the high court judgment was in contradiction of a Constitutional Court precedent and comes despite paragraph 159 of the high court judgment acknowledging it would be “an impossible burden” on the state “to accommodate those who have been evicted, and who are going to be rendered homeless in virtually every suburb or area in which they live”.
In its court documents, the City argued that it had not acted unconstitutionally by not providing emergency housing to the occupiers, and similarly placed people in the inner city.
The City contends it delivers on the emergency housing programme by creating incremental development areas, and temporary relocation areas. Recently, it said it had begun to develop emergency housing within existing settlements and did not generally provide emergency housing in the inner city.
The City argued it took a wide range of “reasonable” steps in accommodating the occupiers. It said there was no basis for the mandatory order that the high court made, directing it to provide occupiers with temporary emergency accommodation in a specific area.