The City of Cape Town’s Mayoral Committee Member for Human Settlements, Councillor Malusi Booi, conducted a site visit at the City’s Ndabeni Depot on Wednesday, 7 July 2021, to look at work being done by City teams. The City is continuing to carry out maintenance and upgrades at its affordable rental Community Residential Units (CRUs), even amid the resurgence of Covid-19 and amended lockdown regulations. The City has spent approximately R1 billion in maintenance at its public housing units over the past two years.
“Essential maintenance and repair work is continuing at City affordable rental units across the metro despite Alert Level 4 regulations while adhering to Covid-19 health and safety protocols. We are a caring City and work is ongoing at all times, in all areas. I am pleased by what I have seen here today. It is clear that staff members and contractors are working hard to upgrade our affordable housing and, in doing so, improve the lives and living conditions of our residents,” said Councillor Booi.
Earlier this year, the City’s Public Housing Department embarked on a new R150 million initiative over the next three years, to not only enhance necessary and important maintenance and repairs to its affordable rental units across the metro, but also to empower small and medium-size contractors by giving them the opportunity to do the work.
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This is a partnership between the City and the National Housing Finance Corporation (NHFC). Due to the many thousands of affordable rental stock units the City has, low levels of rental income collected for maintenance work and limited resources, there are repairs and maintenance service request backlogs.
“In addition to our partnership with the NHFC, the City will also make use of term tender contractors to address the demand for plumbing work in public housing. The Public Housing Department expects to have the term tenders in place by the end of this year. Our rental stock was built many years ago with the resultant increases in plumbing-related and other complaints. There is also abuse of the sewer system to dispose of items which are better suited for the refuse collection system. The result of this abuse is sewer blockages. Water leaks and sewer blockages are prioritised and attended to as quickly as possible.
“We thank our residents for their patience while work is ongoing. We are making every effort to complete work on site as soon as possible amid Covid-19 infections of our maintenance staff. We will continue to engage with our residents so that we work together to improve the living conditions of our residents and their families,” said Councillor Booi.
By far the most service requests are vandalism-related.The City’s Public Housing Department has spent more than R24 million since June 2019 in vandalism-related repair work at its CRUs. This severely drains the maintenance budget. These maintenance costs are one of the biggest reasons why normal maintenance is often delayed at these units.
