An order of the Western Cape High Court brought protest action by Reclaim the City (RTC) on Site B in the Cape Town inner city to an abrupt end this week. According to a News24 report, as the housing activists were settling in for their first night in shacks they had erected that morning, police officers arrived and read the interdict out loud.

Lawyers who had secured the interdict on behalf of Growthpoint – the developer which purchased the property from the City of Cape Town in 2016 – were also present.

After a brief discussion, the activists decided to comply with the order to vacate.

Bevil Lucas, a spokesperson for the activists, said that the departure from the site was not a defeat for RTC and the other organisations and communities that had joined in. ‘This was never about a permanent occupation. This was a symbolic protest to raise the issue of the housing crisis faced by the working class,’ he said.

Growthpoint's application to the High Court, however, framed the erection of the shacks as a serious risk to the property. In an accompanying affidavit, the developer's asset manager, Timothy Irvine, wrote that the aim of the activists was ‘clearly to unlawfully expropriate the land’ and that Growthpoint faced ‘the very real and substantial risk that its property will be lost to it’.

Irvine accused the organisers of ‘plot-farming’, which he described as charlatans exploiting poor people by selling fake housing rights to plots of land which they do not own.

Full News24 report