{"id":243829,"date":"2022-11-23T20:28:51","date_gmt":"2022-11-23T18:28:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.groundup.org.za\/article\/stellenbosch-backyarders-threaten-to-occupy-golf-course\/"},"modified":"2022-11-23T20:28:51","modified_gmt":"2022-11-23T18:28:51","slug":"stellenbosch-backyarders-threaten-to-occupy-golf-course","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/stellenbosch-backyarders-threaten-to-occupy-golf-course\/","title":{"rendered":"Stellenbosch backyarders threaten to occupy golf course"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"article_body\">\n<p><a class=\"bigger-image\" href=\"https:\/\/www.groundup.org.za\/media\/uploads\/images\/vusi_mokoena\/stelleboschbackyarders-vusimokoena-20221123.jpg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img decoding=\"async\" alt src=\"http:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/11\/stellenbosch-backyarders-threaten-to-occupy-golf-course.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p class=\"caption\">Members of the Stellenbosch Backyard Dwellers\u2019 Forum marched to the Stellenbosch Town Hall, demanding affordable housing. Photo: Vusi Mokoena<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Stellenbosch backyarders marched to the Stellenbosch municipality on Wednesday to hand over a housing petition with nearly 1,000 signatures.<\/li>\n<li>The Stellenbosch Backyard Dwellers\u2019 Forum says land promised to them for housing by the mayor has now been sold to private developers.<\/li>\n<li>They say if the municipality does not respond within seven days they will occupy the Stellenbosch Golf Club.<\/li>\n<li>Stellenbosch municipality says that housing is a provincial and national competency and is doing everything it can to provide housing.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Stellenbosch backyarders say that if their housing demands are not heard they will occupy the Stellenbosch Golf Club.<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" alt class=\"leave\" height=\"1\" id=\"gu_counter\" src=\"http:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/11\/stellenbosch-backyarders-threaten-to-occupy-golf-course.gif\" width=\"1\"><\/p>\n<p>About 50 members of the Stellenbosch Backyard Dwellers Forum marched to the Stellenbosch town hall on Wednesday demanding progress on housing developments they say were promised to them by the municipality.<\/p>\n<p>They live in shacks in the backyards of homes in Cloetesville, paying rent of between R800 and R2,500 a month to the homeowners. The Forum handed a petition to the municipality, signed by 966 people, demanding that several pieces of land be earmarked for housing for backyarders.<\/p>\n<p>The Forum said that in nearby Kayamandi, the municipality had acquired land and built houses on it for people who had occupied the land. But their own demands had been ignored, they said. \u201cShould we also start invading land illegally before we are listened to?\u201d they said in the petition.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cShould we not receive any feedback within seven days we will definitely disrupt\/invade the golf course,\u201d they said.<\/p>\n<p>Forum secretary PJ Plaatjies told GroundUp that the backyarders had been engaging with the municipality since 2011. According to Plaatjies, a piece of land in Cloetesville had been identified by the mayor and the backyarders had been promised houses there. But he said the land had now been sold to private property developers.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe know they will pay attention when we invade the golf course because that is where the rich people go,\u201d said Plaatjies.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cOur people are suffering,\u201d said Christine Steyn, treasurer of the Forum. \u201cWe are blocked by the municipality, they are selling our land to outside people and it\u2019s going to stop this year. We\u2019ve been peaceful long enough.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Steyn says that the security complexes being built around Cloetesville are unaffordable for backyarders.<\/p>\n<p>Stellenbosch Municipality spokesperson Stuart Grobbelaar, told GroundUp that the municipality would respond to the memorandum within seven days. He said the municipality engaged with the Forum on a regular basis.<\/p>\n<p>According to Grobbelaar, the municipality has identified several pieces of land in Cloetesville and has applied for funding for feasibility studies from the Department of Human Settlements.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cHuman settlements is a national and provincial competency and mandate,\u201d Grobbelaar says, \u201cMunicipalities across the country act merely as implementing agents for housing projects based on funding received from these spheres of government.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cStellenbosch Municipality provides as many housing opportunities as possible with the limited resources that we receive.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<div id=\"article_copyright\">\n<p>\u00a9 2022 GroundUp. This article is licensed under a <a href=\"http:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-nd\/4.0\/\" rel=\"license\">Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>You may republish this article, so long as you credit the authors and GroundUp, and do not change the text. Please include a link back to the original article.<\/p>\n<p>We put an invisible pixel in the article so that we can count traffic to republishers. All analytics tools are solely on our servers. We do not give our logs to any third party. Logs are deleted after two weeks. We do not use any IP address identifying information except to count regional traffic. We are solely interested in counting hits, <b>not tracking<\/b> users. If you republish, please do not delete the invisible pixel.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/11\/stellenbosch-backyarders-threaten-to-occupy-golf-course.jpg\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.groundup.org.za\/\">Source: GroundUp<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Members of the Stellenbosch Backyard Dwellers\u2019 Forum marched to the Stellenbosch Town Hall, demanding affordable housing. Photo: Vusi Mokoena Stellenbosch backyarders marched to the Stellenbosch municipality on Wednesday to hand over a housing petition with nearly 1,000 signatures. The Stellenbosch Backyard Dwellers\u2019 Forum says land promised to them for housing by the mayor has now [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":243830,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[9928],"tags":[28001],"class_list":{"0":"post-243829","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-groundup","8":"tag-groundup","9":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/11\/stellenbosch-backyarders-threaten-to-occupy-golf-course.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243829","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=243829"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243829\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/243830"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=243829"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=243829"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=243829"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}