Eldorado Park residents will have to wait until geotechnical land studies have been completed before new community housing can be built, said MEC Kgaogelo Lekgoro.

While land had been identified for the construction of mixed income housing units, work had to be done before any project was embarked on, he told residents at a community hall on Thursday.

"In the work that my predecessors have done in the past, portions of land within Eldorado Park have been identified," he said.

"This land may be suitable for building about 3000 mixed income housing units. We have also identified an opportunity in the area you call the 'CBD' to build about 1000 housing units.

"What we should separate though, from the possibility of building the housing units and actually having housing units, is the work that should be done prior to any project coming here."

The biggest problem was finding the resources to build houses, Lekgoro said. Nonetheless, within the available resources, work had to be done to ensure people living in shacks found suitable accommodation.

Eldoradopark residents resorted to violence when metro police demolished 200 of their shacks last month.

They stoned the metro police officers and barricaded roads with burning tyres. Police eventually fired rubber bullets to disperse them.

The coloured residents felt blacks were being given precedence when it came to housing and that they were being overlooked.

At Thursday's meeting a disgruntled resident said: "We have seen development taking place around us where people in Freedom Park, across the road, have received houses and we have been overlooked."

Lekgoro noted that many of the concerns raised by residents were genuine and that, over time, Eldorado Park's coloured residents had come to believe they were being selectively marginalised.

Sapa

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