William Bowler, Hout Bay
The chair of the Hout Bay Community Health Forum is quoted in last week’s Sentinel as saying that “health is more important than a nice-to-have park” (“Headline”, Sentinel News, Date). Quite so.
So why stop at acquiescing in the building of a new clinic on the old bowling green and adjacent car park? If there is a Community Housing Forum in the suburb (there probably is, since there seem to be thousands of forums in Hout Bay with all sort of agendas), why not give over the whole of the Common for the building of multi-storey low-cost housing, and tell the Lions to take their pesky market elsewhere. After all, if there’s housing there, it will be on the doorstep of the clinic and just across the road from the shops. How very convenient.
And don’t forget that there are some other pieces of open ground which could also been given over to noble multi-storey low-cost housing projects, such as the ground at the top of Willow Way and between Park Avenue and Luisa Way. Who cares about those from the forgotten third of the suburb’s communities who like to walk their dogs there. After all, caring for loving pets is just a “Western thing” (just like corruption, as our esteemed president tells us).
One must applaud Roscoe Jacobs of the civic association for calling on the City to create a “loop” in Hout Bay for the MyCiTi buses to help residents get to the clinic. As one of the retired “poorer white people” alluded to by Kenny Tokwe, I hope there will be a bus stop right outside my house.
Viva, the concrete jungle, viva.
