A city split in two: budget betrays the poor

THIS article draws directly from the official City of Cape Town budget document: Annexure 21 Projects Over R50 Million: 2024/25. A full sector-by-sector analysis covering Housing, Water and Sanitation, Energy, Transport, and Digital Infrastructure including all Top 20 projects in each category.

- FAIEZ JACOBS

Cape Town's 2024/25 budget is being marketed as a record investment in infrastructure, growth, and future-readiness. Glossy graphics showcase R36.8 billion in capital projects from smart city operations and solar grids to road upgrades and wastewater treatment plants. The DA-led City Council proclaims progress. But beneath this polished façade lies a deeper, more uncomfortable truth: this budget reinforces the city's spatial and economic apartheid, entrenching exclusion while branding it as modernisation.

Across five sectors - Housing, Water and Sanitation, Energy, Transport, and Digital Infrastructure - a clear pattern emerges. While poor and working-class communities receive rhetorical inclusion and a few tactical investments, the lion's share of funding is absorbed by already well-serviced, wealthier areas. We are not witnessing pro-poor development. We are watching the deepening of a Tale of Two Cities.

1. Human Settlements: Perpetuating Spatial Apartheid:

Of the Top 20 Housing Projects, valued at R2.55bn, the city directs funding mostly toward peripheral townships: Blue Downs, Gugulethu, Mfuleni, and Atlantis. On the surface, this seems just. But scratch deeper and a disturbing omission appears: there is no major inner-city social housing project funded over R50m. Not in Salt River. Not in Woodstock. Not in the Foreshore.

This is despite court orders compelling the city to act, available well-located public land and a backlog of over 400 000 families on the waiting list.

Projects like the Airport Industria housing development remain in limbo, delayed by bureaucratic inertia and political resistance. In contrast, R247m is earmarked to build mixed-use housing further away from the CBD entrenching commuting costs, congestion, and carbon footprints. Apartheid's logic lives on, not by law, but by land use and budget choices.

2. Water and Sanitation: Cape Flats Neglected While Camps Bay Thrives: