GOOD Speech by Brett Herron,
GOOD Secretary-General & Member of the Western Cape Parliament
20 August 2026
*Note to editors: This speech was delivered during a debate on the housing crisis in the Provincial Parliament
The provincial government’s responsibilities in addressing the Western Cape’s housing crisis, dismantling apartheid-era spatial planning and tackling the affordability crisis, and the progress the province has made in meeting these objectives.
Concourt’s Tafelberg judgement did not tell this Government anything it didn’t already know.
The judgement quotes the province’s own assessment of spatial injustice in Cape Town.
“Exclusionary land markets militate against spatial integration of socio-economic groups and limit affordable housing to well-located land. At the same time, government sits on well-located under-utilised land.”
In simpler terms, “exclusionary land markets” refers to an urban economy where the high financial value of well-located land automatically prices out low- and middle-income residents.
In Cape Town, this market structure is not an accident or a product of supply and demand: it was deliberately engineered by this government’s predecessors to lock the working-class majority out of well-located urban areas.
The court strongly emphasises however that it is the government, not the housing market, that should be in charge of breaking down inherited spatial separations.
“It is not sufficient for the City to ‘wipe its hands’ and claim that the scarcity and market value of land make the provision of housing difficult… The City cannot rely on land scarcity when it has a positive constitutional duty to address that very scarcity.”
What the court is telling this government is: Stop using the fact that housing is expensive in well-located areas as an excuse to perpetuate apartheid spatial injustice.
Stop using the excuse of a divided past to justify a divided future.
Again, nothing the Province didn’t already know.
This government adopted the Cape Town Central City Regeneration Programme Framework in 2010 specifically to investigate the feasibility of social housing on well-located public land, alongside a Property Development Process to govern sales of public land.
Sixteen years before the Tafelberg judgement the DA government identified the exact problem the judgment addresses and wrote a plan to solve it.
It saw the crisis, but did nothing…
The Court’s findings simply put a judicial stamp on a decade and a half of inaction.
Where you live matters.
Location, the Court was explicit, cannot be treated as incidental: it is a measure of whether access to land is equitable, and any government serious about redress has a constitutional duty to reverse the spatial injustice apartheid planning left behind.
This is not a new legal standard.
It is the 2010 framework, the provincial mandate, restated by a court because the province chose not to act on it voluntarily.
But there is another question here, and it goes to how this government has conducted itself.
For a decade, the Province and the City stood and told us about their plans, glossy pipeline projects, feasibility studies, mixed-use developments always just over the horizon.
And for a decade, we believed them.
But the Constitutional Court exposed what this was: not governance, but a decade-long alibi, dressed up as policy.
A government that presents plans as evidence of its good faith while withholding implementation of the plan is not acting in good faith.
The Court went on to name the human costs of this government’s inaction.
Again, nothing we don’t already know. Spatial inequality condemns people who can least afford the travel costs to hours-long commutes.
That was true before 2010.
It was true when Tafelberg was first argued.
And if the province’s own delivery figures are anything to go by, it is truer now than it has ever been.
Because here is what “no progress” actually looks like, in numbers.
In 2019/20, the province delivered 8038 fully subsidised BNG homes.
By 2024/25, that number had collapsed to 3046, a fall of well over 60% in five years, against a backlog that has swollen to nearly 689,000 households.
This is not stagnation. It is active retreat.
And, over the same period this government extended its decades long record of having built ZERO affordable homes anywhere near the centre of Cape Town.
Active retreat that led to this government forfeiting over R800 million in housing grants, that it chose not to spend, to National Treasury and other provinces, over the past two financial years.
Active retreat, while protesting about SHRA withholding 2,400 housing opportunities, as if national government were some foreign hostile power sabotaging Western Cape’s good intentions.
As if the DA does not sit in the GNU or on the national executive.
As if a courageous and committed government cannot solve for that funding problem.
The DA strategy of accepting the perks of participating in government and then blaming the very government it co-governs with for its own province’s failure to build houses tells us everything we need to know about this government’s integrity.
I did not bring this subject for discussion to crow over the Concourt confirming what we all already know.
I brought it because where you live matters, especially in this City that embodied and continues to embody the spatial planning of White men in fedora and homburg hats.
Thank you.