Tag: housing

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The problem with SRAs

ANTHONY BUTLER | Cape Town residents pay double to see results, but equality before the law suffers

Three changes that would help the city resolve its ‘patchworked public space’

First published in Business Day

November 05, 2026


While yesterday’s municipal elections will shuffle the political players in councils, residents are often controlled by less visible and more enduring mechanisms of public authority.

Cape Town has a by-law for almost everything in its parks. Plant a shrub without the City Parks Director’s written permission and you are breaking section 10 of the Public Parks By-law. Nail a poster to a tree and you have broken it twice.

Nobody is prosecuted for guerrilla gardening, of course. Every city writes more rules than it can enforce, so the real law of a public space is not what the by-law says. It is what officers choose to act on, where, and against whom. In Cape Town, that choice increasingly depends on who has paid for it, and on who has taken over local mechanisms of enforcement.

Since 2004, Cape Town has let property owners vote to tax themselves extra. Under section 22 of the Municipal Property Rates Act, if the owners of a majority of properties in an area agree, the council levies an additional rate and passes it to a non-profit company that runs a special rating area (SRA), sometimes known as a city improvement district (CID). The money buys “top-up” services, such as cleaners, private security patrols and dedicated City Law Enforcement officers (or “rent-a-cops”).

That last item matters because private guards have limited powers. The Central City Improvement District funds a dozen law enforcement officers to give it fining and arrest powers, and some local SRAs are following suit.

The by-laws are the same across the metro but enforcement is not. In a CID, a complaint about someone sleeping on a bench results in the dispatch of an officer. SRAs with cynophobic board members can threaten to enforce moribund by-laws against neighbourhood dogs. Elsewhere in the city, such complaints are simply ignored.

A study by Paasche, Yarwood and Sidaway, geographers who have studied private policing in Cape Town’s CIDs, offers the sharpest account of what this produces. They note that private security serves small, bounded patches of the city, while the police must answer for the city as a whole. The rational strategy for a CID is therefore not to solve a problem but to displace it. This applies, above all, to the people and activities city managers and SRA boards regard as “undesirable”.

The results in “a patchworked public space” stitched around private enclaves of abundance. A man moved on from a CID-patrolled square does not vanish — he reappears in a suburb where no one has paid for enforcement.

The stakes are highest for people with nowhere else to go. Estimates of the number of people living on Cape Town’s streets are typically multiples of available shelter beds. A fine for sleeping rough houses no one, and neither does being “moved on”. It only decides which neighbourhood that person sleeps in next.

None of this requires bad faith. SRAs are answerable to the City, a councillor sits in on their board meetings, and they pay for real cleaning, security, and social work. Owners who pay twice for services are entitled to expect results. But the cumulative effect is a city where “equality before the law” has quietly become equality only on paper.

Three changes would help. First, the city should publish enforcement data by ward and by by-law, so residents can see where fines are issued and where complaints die. Second, CIDs should report how many people their officers move on, and where they believe they go.

Third, park and public space by-laws should be pruned of rules nobody means to enforce. What remains after consultation should be applied evenly and fairly. A by-law enforced only where someone pushes for it and pays for it is not really a law. It is a private service.

Butler teaches public policy at the University of Cape Town

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Waterfront Watershed?

ANTHONY BUTLER | Cape Town faces tough questions about inclusive urban development

Healthy debate around the V&A Waterfront’s role in reinforcing or bridging Cape Town’s divide

First published in Business Day

September 10, 2026

The Victoria & Alfred (V&A) Waterfront is often presented as one of the world’s most successful urban regeneration projects. Jointly owned since 2011 by Growthpoint Properties and the Public Investment Corporation, the Waterfront this year boasts 13 hotels, 15 conference venues, 400 small and medium sized businesses, 170,000 cruise passengers from 63 ships, and 25 million visits from locals and tourists.

The V&A has also attracted sustained criticism over the years. It has been described by its critics as an exclusive enclave in an unequal city. Despite public accessibility, the precinct is managed by a private company, with its own security, rules, and commercial priorities. It offers a polished, safe version of Cape Town that is largely disconnected from the poverty visible only a few kilometres away.

While the Waterfront has been successful economically, moreover, that success has pushed up surrounding property values in Green Point, De Waterkant and the Foreshore. Disagreement has simmered about whether this represents healthy urban regeneration or displacement of lower-income residents and businesses – a reason new luxury residential developments provoke strong reactions.

The V&A therefore embodies a fascinating tension, serving as a great post-apartheid urban success story and a major engine of employment and tourism, but also as a symbol of the city’s – and the country’s — enduring spatial inequality.

A new phase of V&A development promises further controversy. New residential blocks and hotels (one rather spectacular) are under construction, and both retail and entertainment spaces are expanding. A “superyacht arena” will shortly open to host the mega-ships of the world’s typically rather odious but high-spending billionaires.

Now a planned R24bn Granger Bay expansion project proposes to reclaim about 3.8 hectares from the sea and create a new protected bay, tidal pools, beaches, hotels, apartments, offices and public promenades.

Speaking at the Cape Town Press Club earlier this week, Waterfront CEO Graham Wood claimed the project will create thousands of construction and permanent jobs, improve coastal protection against storm surges, and provide new public access to the shoreline. Opponents continue to raise concerns about building heights, years of heavy construction traffic as breakwaters are built, and impacts on marine ecosystems and archaeological remains.

Litigation-happy local residents can be bought off, and city mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis and national environment minister David Maynier — both of whom belong to the more reputable wing of the Democratic Alliance (DA) — are likely to give the reclamation application a sympathetic hearing. Necessary parliamentary ratification, however, is likely to prove challenging.

In key respects, the Waterfront exemplifies a controversial model of urban development and city growth championed by the DA. Perhaps best conceptualised by influential urban economist Ted Graeber, this approach suggests that city governments should conceptually separate two fundamentally different roles: a “for-profit” function, in which the city acts like a real estate developer, assembling land, investing in infrastructure, enabling density, and capturing increases in land value to generate revenue; and a “social” function, through which revenue generated from land and property development is used to pay for the city’s central public mission of reducing poverty through housing, services, transport, and other social investments.

Graeber’s memorable formulation is that a city should think of itself as owning a profitable real estate company whose purpose is to fund a non-profit poverty reduction organisation.

If this is indeed the DA’s position, the pre-election period would be an appropriate time for DA leaders to set it out. The interesting debate is not whether the Waterfront can succeed economically, but whether the City is appropriately separating its revenue-generating property business from its redistributive activities, whether valuable public land is being managed with a coherent value-capture model, and how the overall strategy will ultimately produce a more inclusive and prosperous city.

Butler teaches public policy at the University of Cape Town