Costa and Sharyn Cassimatis have been visiting family in Paradise Park since 1987, and bought a home there six years ago. “We can't expect someone from the camp to help us move because they're in the same predicament,” Cassimatis said. Photo by Maresia Demons
“We were like a family in Paradise Park and now we're torn apart,” says Elkelyn Foley as she packs up the last of her belongings at her Paradise Park home in Hermanus.
This week, she and about 100 others were evicted from the campsite, ending a decade-long fight to prevent the evictions.
Paradise Park, located on Vermont's Route 43, was home to mostly pensioners and Social Security recipients. For many of its permanent residents, it was a quiet place to retire.
But because the private park was in breach of city regulations and would cost millions of rand to rectify, residents were given eviction notices in 2015 and again in 2016. The owners then decided to sell.
In 2017, Magna Business Services purchased the 22-hectare park for development purposes.
The residents went to court to try to stop the eviction, but in April 2022, the Western Cape High Court upheld the eviction and gave the residents three months to vacate. The residents appealed and filed a petition calling for the presiding judge to step down. Both cases were dismissed in October 2022.
On June 25th of this year, a court issued a warrant for Magna to evict the remaining residents.
The evictions, led by the Red Ants, began on Monday and continued into Thursday. By Wednesday evening, only a few families remained, some still packing up their belongings.
When GroundUp visited the park in 2022, more than 100 households were living there.
Costa Cassimatis and his wife, Sharyn, have lived in Paradise Park for six years. They both rely on Social Security benefits, and Cassimatis, who is paraplegic, does small amounts of woodworking to make ends meet.
“There was a lot of other people's belongings dumped on the side of the road behind the camp. The same thing happened when people were evicted in 2022. People had to sleep next to their belongings to prevent them from being stolen,” Sharin said.
She said the only place she and her husband could stay was at her brother's house in Philippi, Cape Town, about two hours away. “Without my brother, we don't know where we would go,” she said.
She said family friends collected most of the furniture and took it to Betty's Bay on Tuesday, but they still had to figure out how to get it to Philippi.
“Their pensions are running out because we have to pay for gas to transport their goods. We can't expect them to work for free,” Costa said.
Elkelyn Foley has been living in Paradise Park since August 2018. She also relies on social benefits.
“It's heartbreaking,” she said.
She plans to move into a friend's abandoned house in Sandia, where the electricity and water were cut off last year.
“At least we have a roof over our heads, otherwise we have to sleep in the bush like the mountain people,” she said.
Emma Duddy said she and her three children have to share their RDP home in Houston with other residents and her son. She is unemployed and has lived in Paradise Park for seven years.
“With six of us, a cat and a dog, it's getting cramped. We'll keep looking for a bigger place, but our priority is to have a roof over our heads and not sleep on the streets,” she said.
In 2018, the city allocated emergency housing to the Stanford Housing Development, about 30 kilometers from Paradise Park. Applicants for emergency housing in Stanford will be provided with toilets (including disabled toilets) for every five households, taps for 20 households (with additional taps for elderly accessibility), and 24 square meters of informal housing units per applicant.
But, Mr. Hooley said, “They gave us a sheet of tin that we had to put up ourselves.”
Sharyn Cassimatis said she refused to move into emergency housing because of a lack of facilities. “We have to go outside to use the toilet, but what about Costa, who is in a wheelchair? Why should he move into a tin shed when we have a house?”
“If requested, the city will assist wherever possible with emergency housing,” Overstrand mayor Dean O'Neill said.
This article was first published on GroundUp.