Fish Hoek: DA plays the expropriation game

Landowners accuses the municipal authority of orchestrating a de facto expropriation of Lochiel Smallholdings, a 28-hectare tract near Masiphumelele, by destroying the value of their properties and forcing sale. In two FAQ documents (read here and here), they contend that the city’s spatial development framework is deliberately coercive and essentially fraudulent.

The plan is to declare the land “unproductive” or “underutilised”, despite sustaining hundreds of jobs and diverse enterprises. Then they plan to destroy property values. The primary measure for depressing the property values is a planned shacktown to be built by the City itself – a “temporary relocation area” (TRAs) at the site’s entrance to accommodate 1,350 households, or roughly 5,000 people, including non-nationals ineligible for permanent housing. The City admits this will be effectively permanent. This will naturally overwhelm infrastructure (sewage, water, traffic) and increase crime, rendering businesses nonviable, compelling “willing” sales at depressed prices.

This is a pivot from 2018’s explicit statement of intention to expropriate, thwarted by procedural hurdles, to a soft “acquisition” plan through sabotage by zoning regulation, sidestepping the 2021 Expropriation Act’s mandates: demonstrating public interest, exhausting alternatives, and affording fair compensation. There are ample alternatives, including 2,637 hectares of vacant municipal land outside biodiversity zones, relocation vouchers, or developer swaps, but the city prioritises LSH’s proximity for Masiphumelele’s expansion, a matter of convenience rather than necessity. The lies have been breathtaking: while public documents advertise demand for only a 70% acquisition target, councillors have boasted to residents that they are going to take all of it, excluding institutional plots.

The biggest benefit of sabotaging the area in this way is that it bypasses the 2021 Expropriation Act’s requirements for proving public interest, exploring alternatives and ensuring fair compensation. The City did try to look to expropriation again in 2021, but have realised that the act of pursuing this avenue would open the City up to a countersuit under the Promotion of Administrative Justice Act, and force legal consideration of the City’s disingenuous evaluations. 

But this is just downstream of other desperate behaviour by the City. The residents the City plans to move to Fish Hoek come from an area of the adjacent township which the City wants to turn into a highway after deleting the wetlands. The Noordhoek Environmental Action Group (NEAG) has taken the City to court to protect breeding grounds for the endangered western leopard toad.

But this is a long-running problem. The reason the City spends all its time shunting residents about like pieces in a sliding puzzle is that they have been incentivising both land invasions and foreign property investment. They can’t afford to touch foreign-owned luxury areas, because the City relies on them for revenue. But having pushed a policy of handing out title deeds and free utilities to land invaders since 2006, there is little available land left.

So Geordin Hill-Lewis’s new policy is using coercive measures to dump tens of thousands of housing units on unsuspecting legacy residents, even if it means destroying local economies. Sometime, as in the case of Eersterivier’s Itemba Small Farms, they have used force, fraud and bribery, even illegally shutting off of water, violating a 2010 court order to leave the residents alone. The Coloured farmers at Itemba are being forced off their land into accommodation that was made by clearing further residents out using illegal and (in fact impotent) threats of cutting off of SASSA grants.

The whole City is becoming a violent and destructive puzzle where people are the pieces. But all of this could have been avoided if the DA had an actual strategy for dealing with land invasions. They have been in control of the Provincial Parliament since 2011, but have never tried reforming eviction legislature, despite housing being a provincial competency. Instead, from the very moment they got their first foothold in the province, the party has tried to outflank the ANC from the left on land issues, while paying lip service to their legacy voting base’s concerns.

From 2010 to 2025, Cape Town’s informal settler population climbed from approximately 638,000 to 954,000, according to Statistics South Africa data, nearly doubling as the metro’s total inhabitants expanded from 3.8 million to 5.1 million. The City is now the second-worst for land invasions in the country after Durban, and the province is the worst of all nine in South Africa. It is the only province where the rate of informal settlement has increased over the past 20 years, as everywhere else it has declined. You can read more about this here.

The real question is, what can residents do? Once planning is passed by the council, a lawsuit would cost millions, and likely fail. According to local party insiders, the only possible option is to threaten not to vote DA, because the climate inside the party is such that no objections from rank and file are to be entertained. Only if it threatens the party’s seats in council will they consider changing their position.

The DA thrives on being able to abuse their voters, so long as they are not *quite* as bad as being governed by the ANC. This is a race to the bottom that can only be stopped by rejecting it.