By David Lipschitz 1st May 2025
The City of Cape Town is preparing their biggest ever increase in taxes (rates, electricity, water, sewage, refuse) for people living in Cape Town.
Capetonians who have believed in the future of this incredible country and who continue to build communities and knit communities together should be applauded, not penalised. Now our government wants to destroy that.
The City has already introduced service fees for water and electricity, but it about to get a lot worse; great for visitors and non-working people who retire here, but soon locals won't be able to afford to live in this city anymore, and the visitors will leave when they don't have employees to cook and wash and clean for them anymore.
Destroyed communities leads to more cameras, more lights, more police and more crime.
One should note that the City and DA have fought against the VAT increase, which would have gone to central government, and they said this would hurt average South Africans. Yet at the same time the City and DA wants to increase rates and other fees sometimes by 25% or more.
The City also wants to change water service fees to be by value of property, rather than by pipe supply diameter (size). This is yet another disincentive for people to save water because as you use less water you pay more per kL. This is the same for electricity. As you use less electricity, you pay more per kWh, when the service fee is included. Our water fixed cost is likely to double and it will triple when sanitation is added (how sane is this new tax, which taxes ordinary Capetonians who are subsidisng new entrants to Cape Town who are overloading our systems), and our volumetric cost is likely to go up 25%. Our bin refuse collection tax goes up 34%.
We also know that governments say that new taxes will be low, but this is just until they are accepted. Then the taxes go up faster than inflation!
The way to keep families and communities safe happens when people live in their communities for a long time, when they know each other and when they build together.
There are two completely new tariffs: one for "cleaning" and the other a basic charge for sewage. I already don't like that Sewage is based on water consumption. If Sewage is based on water consumption then it should be based on Winter Water Consumption, as in summer a lot of water is used for watering gardens and filling pools and never gets to sewage! And some suburbs know how to keep themselves clean. Why should they pay for people to don't care what their suburbs look like?
And then the City wants to increase rates by 8%, well above inflation, yet house prices are also going up, so it is possible that some people will get 25% or higher rates increases. This is grossly unfair, as I describe in my email to the City below.
The comment period ends on 2nd May 2025. I have emailed the following comments to: Budget.Comments@capetown.gov.za.
Anyone (adults and children) moving to Cape Town should pay a R10,000 levy per person which should go to an infrastructure fund.
New owners should pay rates according to the latest house prices, and long term people should be given the benefits they have accrued for building their communities.
People moving from outside Cape Town, buying property here should pay an additional 5% levy on the value of their property to the City Infrastructure Fund, to unburden locals from having their infrastructure overloaded by new people who expect that locals will subsidize their services!
The maximum a rates bill should increase should be inflation plus 2%. This should be retroactively adjusted back to 1994.
A person who saved, paid off their house, should not have any rates increases as an incentive for people to save and not take out unnecessary debt.
Anyone over the age of 60 who still has a bond, should only have inflationary rates increases.
It is unfair for the City to get huge valuation based increases and at the same time increase the cents in the Rand.
People I know who live in squatter camps own property where they come from. In one case, a person owns two properties in the Eastern Cape. In another a foreigner owns a large property in his country. And I have to pay for them to live for free in Cape Town so that they can look poor here, whilst owning property elsewhere.
An additional benefit of this plan is that renters will be protected where they rent from long term homeowners.
