#Letter: North Coast sitting on a social time bomb

Ballito resident Ken Lever writes:

Your headline article of August 9 “Squatters served”, your Property Guide on the Sheffield Hills development, and your Property Report all refer.

It must be obvious by now to all longtime residents and to relative newcomers like myself, that we are living with a social time bomb on the Dolphin Coast – as in all other cities and towns in SA – in the form of a critical shortage of decent, safe and hygienic housing, particularly for low- and middle-income people of all backgrounds.

Neither the Department of Public Works nor the municipalities – including KwaDukuza Municipality (KDM) – in our province have got anywhere close to resolving this crisis and filling the enormous and ever widening gap.

KDM boasts they have produced 300 to 400 low-income RDP type houses a year when the demand, both official and unofficial, increases by 4 000 plus a year.

Secondly we, and especially our elected officials, ignore the remarkable energies, enterprise and sheer hard work of so many poor and desperate people in finding and erecting materials of all kinds to make a reasonably waterproof shelter for themselves and their children.

Surely we can and should harness this energy and enterprise in a more positive way, other than “Eviction Notices”.

I am not advocating slipshod, unsafe or unhealthy living conditions. Uncontrolled and totally haphazard development and expansion does no one any good – especially the young condemned to these horrible conditions.

Officialdom and the private sector can and must assist. The matter of uncontrolled, unsafe (witness the number of horrific fires that flatten so many “squatter” villages and cause so many unnecessary deaths) and unhealthy living conditions must be of concern to all of us – and not just our struggling and under-resourced municipality.

A number of concerned developers are addressing the problem in our area, and I congratulate all of them involved in providing middle- and lower-middle income housing such as being built at Sheffield Hills, Ballito Hills and alongside the Ashton sports fields.

But I know of no efforts so far to do anything similar for the much poorer and low-income community, other than the hopelessly inadequate and tiny RDP units by KDM and the Department of Public Works.

Architects and town planners also need to come to the party. There are many examples of successful low-income housing developments in countries with similar social, cultural and demographic problems we can learn from, such as India, China, South-East Asia and South America.

Guided self-help, self-build or site and service assistance has proved successful elsewhere.

Your Property Report does not mention the property purchase option of buying an existing house in the Ballito to Sheffield Beach area and adapting or retrofitting it. It is a lot more eco-friendly and places far less strain on our already over-stretched service supply lines, including water, sewerage, electricity and roadways.

We need to act more seriously and sensitively about saving the planet, avoiding chewing up virgin, open and undeveloped land.

(Letter shortened – Ed)

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