City of Windhoek (CoW) mayor Job Amupanda, said the city has identified land in Otjomuise where some people living in the informal settlements will be relocated to help with decongestion and pave way for better planning.
He said this on Monday during the handing over ceremony of one of the 131 houses constructed so far under the Informal Settlement Upgrading of Affordable Housing Pilot Project in Okuryangava Windhoek.
He said that he has read and studied a report on housing challenges in Windhoek and discovered that informal settlement poses a big challenge that requires redesigning, because the current model cannot help address the situation. Thus the city will relocate some residents in the informal settlements to the new location in order to avail spaces where roads can be constructed and proper demarcation of plots.
‘I directed our Acting Chief Executive Officer and the department responsible for housing to urgently bring an item before the council to approve the relocation center, and the land has already been identified in Otjomuise. Because it serves no purpose to build a house and next to it is a shack and then the next one is a garage, we want to have a visible impact,’ said Amupanda.
He added that the relocation center will have a serviced land and the city will put up municipal-owned houses where relocated people will be accommodated while the city is creating space until such a time the city decides what the way forward is.
‘What is going to happen is that we will go to those informal settlements with a problem of sanitation and identify shacks that will be relocated, the owners will be informed about the certain date that municipality will come with a truck and take them to the relocation center,’ stated Amupanda.
He further added that the vacant places will be used to construct roads and build houses, because some of the areas have no open space or roads and when there is a fire, shacks are in some cases destroyed completely because there are no roads for fire trucks to pass.
Source: Namibia Press Agency
