# The Sports Field at Wallacedene

*A documented case, told from the record of South Africa's Constitutional
Court.*

Wallacedene was an informal settlement on the edge of Oostenberg, in the Cape
metropolitan area. When
the Constitutional Court described it, about half its people were children.
Their shacks lacked water, sewerage and refuse removal, and many families had
waited as long as seven years on the list for subsidised housing. In September
1998 some of them moved onto vacant private land that had been set aside for
low-cost housing. The owner obtained an order to evict them. On 18 May 1999, at
the start of the Cape winter, they were evicted at the municipality's expense,
in a way the Court later called premature and inhumane: their homes were
bulldozed and burnt, and their possessions destroyed. The 510 children and 390
adults who brought the case then sheltered on the Wallacedene sports field,
under plastic sheeting, as the winter rains started.[^grootboom-facts]

The judgment, given in October 2000, is among the best known in the law of
social rights. The Court held that the state's housing programme fell short of
the Constitution because it made no reasonable provision for people without
land, a roof or anywhere else to go: people in desperate need. It also held
that the Constitution gave the families no claim to shelter immediately on
demand, and it declined to determine a minimum core on the record before it.
Its order declared what the state must do. It ordered housing for
nobody.[^grootboom-holding]

Part I begins where that judgment stopped. It asks who counts as someone a
constitution owes anything to; what exactly is owed, without being earned or
waited for; what evidence would show that it arrived; what happens when there
is genuinely too little to go round; and who must act when nothing reaches the
person. This design writes down what the Court left undetermined: a floor owed
to every person on personhood alone, with a named public body that owes it. By
itself, writing it down would have housed nobody on that sports field. The
chapters show what the rules can say, and where saying it stops.

[^grootboom-facts]: *Government of the Republic of South Africa v Grootboom*
    (CCT 11/00) [2000] ZACC 19, 2001 (1) SA 46 (CC), decided 4 October 2000,
    [paras 7–11 and footnote 2](https://www.saflii.org/za/cases/ZACC/2000/19.html).
    The judgment's own account of the settlement, the move, the eviction and
    the sports field; it is the Court's record, not an independent inquiry.

[^grootboom-holding]: The same judgment, paras 33 and 95 (no claim to shelter
    immediately upon demand; not enough information to determine a minimum
    core) and para 99 (the declaratory order). The Court did not reject a
    minimum core outright; it declined to determine one on that record.

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By dhilipsiva. Prose: CC BY 4.0.

Canonical: https://dhilipsiva.dev/rights-nobody-has-to-earn/read/part-1-the-sports-field-at-wallacedene/

Source: https://github.com/dhilipsiva/rights-nobody-has-to-earn/blob/main/book-1/part-1-the-sports-field-at-wallacedene.md