GOOD Statement by Brett Herron,
GOOD Secretary-General & City of Cape Town Mayoral Candidate
03 August 2026
Last week, Western Cape MEC for Infrastructure Tertuis Simmers was at it again, making a fantabulous announcement about delivering around 12 000 new homes.
Simmers would have been pleased that the announcement was widely reported, and that nobody asked difficult questions about timelines and funding. Because there are no timelines or funding. Just another announcement in an election year…
Making announcements about homes it’s going to build appears to be the central pillar of a DA strategy of deflection, to draw attention away from what the Province and City of Cape Town would regard as three inconvenient facts about its proven housing under-delivery.
- The delivery of subsidised homes has radically diminished on the DA’s watch, down to just 3000 delivered across the province in 2024/25.
- The housing backlog has radically increased, to more than 680 000 households.
- Under DA leadership ZERO affordable homes have been built or are under construction in the increasingly unaffordable inner-city and surrounds, or in any other well-located area previously reserved for Whites.
The Province and City are not only under the pressure of a looming local government election, but also under pressure from the Constitutional Court, to whom they must report (prior to the election) on both their housing plans and actual delivery as one of the provisions of the Tafelberg School judgement.
Simmers’ latest promise of delivering 11 000 housing opportunities on newly released land, nearly 5 000 of them for social and affordable housing, without funds to build any houses, must be seen through that lens.
Hectare counts and headlines sadly provide neither shelter nor comfort to hundreds of thousands of people with neither. When will the first of these 5 000 units actually be constructed, Mr Simmers?
One thing’s for sure: If any of those houses eventually do see the light of day, Simmers and his co-announcer, Mayor of Cape Town Geordin Hill-Lewis, will long be history.