CA1st acknowledges that the spatial planning legacy of Cape Town needs to be addressed and rectified in order to make the city work for everyone. CA1st calls for an audit of the current housing list and undertakes to work on providing decent housing.
- Decent, affordable housing for everyone is a right and not a privilege. This is the departure point for the CA1st as we take our people-first activism from the streets into the City of Cape Town’s Council chambers.
- For us, the provision of housing is much more than just putting a roof over someone’s head. The provision of housing must ensure that people are able to live a dignified life in an environment that allows people to grow and flourish, with work, education, recreation and worship opportunities for all, and with access to basic services, such as water, electricity, sewage, transport and safety.
- The provision of housing is therefore one of the biggest issues for the CA1st because through it, we live our value of human rights and dignity, and it drives the provision of services, which must be at the core of the City’s value proposition to its citizens. It is even more so because of broken promises made by unscrupulous politicians about providing housing for the homeless poor and the backyard dwellers, whose numbers continue to grow, even as the promises continue to be broken.
- The CA1st commits itself to finding out what the plans are and sharing these with the people of Cape Town. We want to review the housing lists and unlock the bureaucratic issues that continue to frustrate the efforts of Capetonians who only desire to have a roof over their heads. We want to understand and unlock the bottlenecks which prevent housing delivery and unravel the complexity of the dependency of bulk services, such as water, or sewage, or electricity. We will take the people of Cape Town into our confidence and share all information related to this crucial subject, as we do the work.
- We commit to annually spending the budgets allocated by National Treasury for basic services such as housing, transport, water and sewerage in an open and transparent manner and not to return these funds as unspent to national treasury.