re-image Hanover Park 2020 Competition

The Hanover Park Backyard-dwellers Organisation will be hosting re-image Hanover Park 2020 Competition. Details of the event will be posted on the later date.

for more information contact Ricardo Sedres
Cell: 0729856836 or email: Hparkbackdwellersorg@gmail.com

MEC tackles Hanover Park gangs

Increased gang violence in Hanover Park, where he grew up, has led to Community Safety MEC Albert Fritz’s call for a meeting with gangs.

“Gangs are part of the problem and must be part of the solution. We must get them to sit around a table and address the problem,” Fritz said on Sunday during a visit.

He said people in Hanover Park knew the township had a strong civic movement and community activism.

“When that declines, crime and gangs take over. There is nothing for our youth to do. We need to get our community organisations back,” he said.

Four people were shot dead and five others, including a two-year-old boy, were wounded during gang violence at the weekend. Police apprehended four suspects and seized a firearm.

Last weekend, three people were killed and five wounded in gang violence, according to a Community Policing Forum member.

Social Development MEC Patricia de Lille, who accompanied Fritz, said the Hanover Park community was clearly traumatised. A huge concern was that young children were recruited into gangs.

“We need a holistic approach. We all need to sit down together to address the issues – including talking to police,” she said.

While Hanover Park Day Hospital staff told Fritz about “another black weekend” and said they had tried their best to cope, Haniff Loonat, head of the Nyanga cluster Community-Police Forum Board, urged residents to alert police about gang violence.

A man had called him on Friday and told him that there would be violence at the weekend, Loonat said.

“He had us baffled and gave us wrong work and cellphone numbers. We did not know whether to believe him or not, but everything he said would happen, happened. I urge him to contact us. We guarantee he will be protected,” he said and added that a community meeting and an anti-crime march were planned.

- Cape Times

Cape gang violence escalating

Gang violence is escalating in Hanover Park near Philippi in Cape Town, the Western Cape government said on Sunday.

The MEC of community safety Albert Fritz would visit the Philippi police station and the Hanover Park community on Sunday afternoon.

“The minister wants to hear from the public and see for himself what the situation is,” his spokeswoman Melany Kuhn said.

“People have been ringing him and texting him from the community all weekend saying 'help! We need intervention the gang violence is out of control'.”

Decreasing gang violence was a priority for the MEC, Kuhn said.

He would be looking at the root cause of the problem and analysing the choices available to young people on the Cape Flats.

“We need to show them (children) that there are other alternatives to joining a gang and we will give them that alternative,” she said.

Gang leaders gave children the wrong impression that joining a gang would provide them with a better lifestyle, she said.

“It's an alluring quick way (to make money), full of bling.”

The youth in the area needed better role models.

Kuhn said Fritz had grown up in Hanover Park and the problem of gang violence “strikes a raw nerve for him”.

The MEC wanted to show the youth in the community that he had beaten the odds and they could as well.

The provincial department had recently met Dr Gary Slutkin from the CeaseFire Initiative in the US.

Slutkin had used the initiative to reduce violent crime in some of Chicago's roughest neighbourhoods by changing the behaviour of offenders, the Sunday Times newspaper reported.

Former gangsters were recruited and taught the skills to coach others caught up in the cycle of violence.

Stakeholders including the police, community policing forums and community leaders from gang-ridden areas were invited to workshops with the goal of bringing a pilot project based on Slutkin's methods to Cape Town.

- Sapa

‘Living like this is making us sick’

Thirty-four people share a one-bedroomed council house in Hanover Park – the majority living in makeshift shacks in the back yard.

All 34 share a single toilet and bath. And if the house is locked, they must use a bucket.

Just one person among the four families sharing the plot has a job.

That is the daily reality for the Hendricks family, who moved into the council house on the 275m2 erf 40 years ago and now share it with their relatives.

They are the human face of life in Cape Town for more than 40 000 people who live in the backyards of the city’s rental properties, the “forgotten people” who live in crowded, unhealthy conditions and have little choice.

In Hanover Park there are an estimated 3 780 backyard residents. Langa has a tally of about 960 backyarders and Factreton 250.

Nyanga has the highest number, estimated at 10 000, while Retreat and Gugulethu have 4 000 each.

Now Hanover Park, Factreton and Langa are set to be pilot areas for the roll-out of basic services to backyard residents by the City of Cape Town. They will get standpipe taps, toilets and solid waste removal from next year.

The roll-out cannot come soon enough for the Hendricks family.

Seven people share the main house and 27 live in four backyard structures which cover the plot, leaving only a tiny outside area.

For this, each family pays between R60 and R80 a month, including water.

But that doesn’t mean hot showers. Bath time is strictly controlled – four minutes a person, starting from 4pm.

In one of the backyard homes, Mymoena Sampson, 43, shares two rooms with her husband, six children, two grandchildren and her disabled cousin. They have lived there for 15 years.

November marks their 20th year on the housing waiting list.

She and her husband sleep on a double bed in one room. Her cousin has a single bed less than a metre away, and the four children are squeezed into the room.

A double bunk is in the other tiny room where four boys sleep, separated from the other room by cardboard and curtains.

Abeda Hendricks, 37, also lives on the property. She shares her home with her husband, four children, a grandchild and son-in-law. It is her husband who has a job.

Her 77-year-old father and 55-year-old mother also live there.

Her mother, Camiela Hendricks, said they had lived in a backyard since they married.

“It’s terrible. We have no privacy. I want to be on my own. Living like this is stressful and is making us sick,” she said.

Each day the children in the main house get first option of using the toilet. Then the others from the yard scramble for their turn before going to school.

When the main house is locked up for the night, everyone has to use buckets to relieve themselves.

Sampson and Hendricks complained that other than the indignity suffered, the girls and women often suffered bladder and other infections because of the bucket system.

Sampson said the city’s plan to install services would help, but what they really needed were homes of their own.

Mayoral committee member for housing Shehaam Sims said the survey revealed that most backyarders had asked for access to their own water, toilets and electricity.

Some landlords illegally cut off access to these facilities when they wanted to force people off their properties, she charged.

The options for installing toilets were either communal or single flushing toilets.

“I will push for flushing toilets. Lessons about communal toilets have been learned hard enough,” said Sims.

Alida Kotzee, of the city’s housing directorate, said an area-specific solution would be investigated in each pilot area.

She added that installing a toilet for each family could be the cheaper option for the city, because the family would be billed and the city would not have ongoing operational costs of maintaining and providing security for communal toilets.

Sims said they were considering providing people with electricity. It would cost R7 000 to electrify each unit.

Exact total costs for the provision of services have not yet been calculated.

Backyard residents are shortchanged regarding the housing waiting list. Allocations are set at 30 percent to backyarders and 70 percent to shack residents. Provincial housing’s Zalisile Mbali said the department wanted that changed to a 50/50 split.

Ricardo Sedres, director of the Hanover Park Backyarders Association, said he welcomed the city’s move to provide basic services.

“But we still feel that housing needs must be addressed because of the many backyarders that have been on the waiting list for many years. They were truly the forgotten people because it’s taken the government 16 years to realise there are actually people living in backyards,” he said.

- Cape Argus

World Zero Evictions Days 2010

On the occasion of World Habitat Day 2010 celebrated by the UN-Habitat with the motto “Better City, Better Life”, the International Alliance of Inhabitants, the world-wide network for housing rights with no frontiers, has issued a critical communiqué launching the World Zero Evictions Days to support resistances and alternatives for participating cities, a concrete foundation for a new Urban Social Pact. At its heart: the demand for a world-wide moratorium to evictions; and funding for housing and habitat in a “New Green Deal” for at least a billion people. This funding would be based, among others, on the investment of an important part of developmental aid as well as on the annulment of external debt, transformed into a Popular Fund for land and housing.

The October mobilisation prepares the final stage of the unifying process to the World Assembly of Inhabitants (WSF Dakar 2011).

The recent summit of the United Nations on the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) attempted to conceal the failure of the MDG 7-11, ignoring scandalously the reality of evictions, undervaluing the consequences of global crisis, the development based on mega-projects and wars, climatic changes and disasters as a pretext of new discrimination of the poorest, migrants and women, as a justification of budget cuts and of public services privatization, of the lack of price controls in the sector and financial/real-estate speculation.

The world-wide coordinated initiatives of struggle and alternative thus have the task to place the housing right in the centre of the debate, starting with the objective to improve life condition of badly housing or homeless people that risk to reach 1,7 billion within 2020 if the governments continue to follow neoliberal policies.

We denounce the illegal evictions and the violations of housing rights. These infringe on Article 11 of the International Covenant on Economic, Cultural, and Social Rights, ratified by over 70 countries (both developed and developing) where these inhuman practices have nevertheless been recorded over the past twelve months.

We invite UN-Habitat to reconsider the trust placed in neoliberal policies, the essential condition to have a "better city, better life". Coherence would require that UN-Habitat also give up the Global Compact proposed to the private sector encouraging the destruction of unoccupied housing and non-profitable neighbourhoods and inflating the costs of real estate. Instead, tools such as the Special Rapporteur on housing rights, the Advisory Group on Forced Evictions (AGFE), the additional protocol for the International Covenant on ESCR should be strengthened.

We support the legitimacy and legality of all inhabitants organizations’ heroic initiatives of resistance, struggle and alternatives to prevent evictions and demand full respect of housing rights. In addition, we support the courage of progressive city halls who declare their territory “eviction-free” by administrative acts that are legitimate and respectful of the legality and development of public and participating policies of city planning and housing.

Finally, we appreciate the growing participation of international organizations for the defense of human rights on this subject, and we point out the fundamental importance of unifying this front, by coordinated campaigns and involvement in the process of the World Assembly of Inhabitants

For these reasons and as a consequence of commitments made at the Urban Social Forum 2010, we are launching the 2010 World Zero Evictions Days with dozens of initiatives on all continents for the duration of the month of October: we are inviting all concerned entities to build a new Urban Social Pact, based on the respect of human rights and the rhythms and demands of the inhabitants, as well as on the development of alternative public policies to straight out oppose the crisis and the invasion of the sector by the market.

A solidary pact between organizations of inhabitants, the public powers that be, and professionals in the sector, agreeing on public control and participating in the construction and the management of sustainable, inclusive cities.

At its heart, a unified demand on all levels of government to obtain immediately:

• A world-wide moratorium to evictions by foreclosure or as a consequence of unpaid rent, because of urban projects or mega-projects, foreign occupation, or on the basis of racial or sexist prejudice;
• Funding for housing and accommodation as a part of a “New Green Deal” to improve living conditions for at least a billion people presently living in a state of insecurity, in inhuman or indecent lodgings;
• The investment of an important part of developmental aid in social housing, cooperatives and habitat, among other things by transforming some external debt into a Popular Funds for land and housing.

Mobilization and struggle then, in this new collaborative stage to build the World Assembly of Inhabitants(WSF Dakar 2011) and beyond, to the Via Urbana.

- International Alliance of Inhabitants