On 7 December 2020, civil society organisations
* submitted a joint proposal to President Cyril Ramaphosa calling for the urgent release of three large and exceptionally well-located parcels of unused or underused military land in Cape Town for the development of low-income housing.
The three identified sites are Youngsfield, Wingfield and Ysterplaat, military airports that are either owned by the Department of Defence or under the custodianship of the Department of Public Works. These sites can provide housing for up to 67 000 households. Instead, they remain underutilised.
Twenty-six years after apartheid, Cape Town remains characterised by spatial inequalities, with the vast majority of poor and working-class families (who are predominantly black and coloured) still being confined to townships and informal settlements on the outskirts of the city. Many peripheral areas in Cape Town have limited access to basic services, forcing families to share an insufficient number of temporary outdoor toilets and to collect water from communal standpipes.