Eleanor Farber, Arum Road
These people who sit around a table and sign off plans are clueless. It means nothing to them (“Plan for Arum Road flats draws fire,” Tabletalk, October 9).
Deputy mayor Eddie Andrews says the development applicant had "motivated his application in accordance with legislated desirability criteria and due process has been followed". Of course the applicant has, along with all the other greedy developers who have done the same but are not mentioned by Alderman Andrews.
If Alderman Andrews had to live in our area, I doubt he would be signing off all these property departures and authorising high-rise blocks of minute pigeon holes. Where do our rights feature? We bought into single residential, established ourselves, and now it has been taken away.
More people in Arum Road, yet we don't have pavements for pedestrians. During peak hours, we cannot get out of our driveway as traffic is backed up bumper to bumper. Just one car parked in the road causes a major problem.
Has Alderman Andrews visited the area in the early morning before school? Table View High and Junior schools are on the Flamingo Vlei side of Blaauwberg Road. The residents from the Winelands side have to cross over Blaauwberg Road. All the roads become gridlocked, there is no access to the R27 besides Wood Drive, Janssens Avenue and Raats Drive, which is near impossible to access at the Bayside circle from Arum Road.
Blaauwberg Road and the MyCiTi bus lanes were built with a huge centre island but no yellow lane pull-off. Emergency vehicles, ambulances, fire trucks etc are blocked in traffic with sirens going and life-saving minutes ticking away because there is no space to get through. That's just in normal peak traffic. What is going to happen if Koeberg sirens go off and we are told to evacuate?
What happens to objections? They seem to evaporate into thin air or fall on deaf ears and into File 13. There are currently four or five, possibly more, applications in for high-rises in Arum Road.
One resident in Arum is going to be between two blocks of flats. At his stage of life, he cannot move. Where is his right to privacy and sunlight? How can the residents of Arum Road be overlooked like this while the City is dead set on turning our tree-lined road into another Parklands Main Road.
Such radical changes being made to an area should come from people that live in the area and have to suffer the frustrations on a daily basis. Where was the building inspector when 119 Arum was being constructed? That is a perfect example of the City not caring. Best I don’t get going on that now. Years down the line and it is standing empty, someone needs to ask why. Thank you Tabletalk for your input.
Leo Minnaar, Arum Road
It’s a bit of a straw man tactic. One block of flats will not cause congestion for the sewerage or traffic per se, but this is not the first one being built. They have not taken (I’m intentionally giving them credit that they are aware of things) into account all the others that have already been passed and built.
This project is not a stand-alone but part of a collection of buildings going up. Don't let them deceive you by saying, “We are following the rules.” Who made the rules? Who is busy seeking to change the rules and who is benefiting financially and at whose expense? You can fool some of the people some of the time but not all the people all the time.
Denis van der Linde, Arum Road
I write this letter as a very concerned owner of a property in Arum Road, Table View. It is extremely sad to see how the City of Cape Town is letting greedy developers buy up lovely established family homes only to knock them down to build flats.
As it is, the traffic getting out of Table View in the morning is hectic. Let's look at what the road in Arum Road looks like already. The top end is in dire need of repair. One can only imagine what the sewerage problem is going to be like when all these three-storey blocks are completed. These pipes were not built to handle all these extra buildings.
What was once a home with maybe a family of four is now going to be 15 to 20 units with who knows how many people living in that unit.
What about the families who had the confidence to buy a home with their hard-earned money only to end up now with a block of flats overlooking their homes and shading their homes from the sun during the day? It is time for the City of Cape Town to protect its homeowners from overcrowding of established suburbs.
Paul Potts, Arum Road
We object as there are four current developments approved for Arum Road. Collectively it will put too much strain on traffic and the drainage system. We have to stop the corruption and greed.
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