Cape Town mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis says public housing will not bridge the gap between the haves and have-nots which see the wealthy living in opulence in Constantia while the poorest in the city languish in Khayelitsha.
He said it would not address segregation, which his city is often criticised for.
“The public housing programme will not address segregation; if anything, it exacerbates it. It finds land on the periphery of cities and incentivises you to develop public housing far away from jobs, public transport, social amenities and so on. The public housing programme by and large makes the problem worse and not better.”
Hill-Lewis was speaking at the Centre for Development Enterprise webinar on Monday, where he revealed that his government is paving a different way to address the crisis through reform.
“We have done some pioneering work here. For example, we codified and published for the first time in South Africa a set of criteria by which we would discount that land all the way to zero if you maximise the social housing yield on that land,” he said.
He added the city had published a set of permanent and perpetual discounts in rates, taxes and service charges so rentals on social housing properties could remain as low as possible in perpetuity.
“We have moved them through the system faster, releasing more of them in the last three years than in the last 10 years prior to that combined. We’ve got a lot of them released out to market and many of them are currently under construction, some are already finished.”
Hill-Lewis hailed his planning amendment by-law passed by the city council last month, which encourages and supports homeowners building extra structures in their yards for rental purposes to bridge the housing gap.
Calling it a game-changer for addressing housing and integration in Cape Town, the mayor believes it will be “adequately recognised in 10 to 20 years to come”.
“This reform backs this network and ecosystem of micro developers. When I was running for mayor, I read this paper on micro developers. I met them and saw what they had done in Delft, it was very interesting. There was a lady called Zama who had taken her mom’s RDP home and built four flats around the outside of the home. Her elderly mom who was a social grant pensioner with her only income being a Sassa pension, all of a sudden moved to earning R16,000 a month in rental income.
“She told me that the Sassa pension is neither here nor there, it’s nice to have but she doesn’t need it any more because she is receiving all this rental income. I just thought to myself, if there are 1,000 Zamas in Cape Town, that is a scale and rate of delivery far faster than the state can ever achieve. That is where we have got to place our efforts.”
Hill-Lewis said he’s had to agitate for a complete change of mindset and attitude towards this solution inside the city administration, albeit amid some resistance.
The mayor conceded that the city is grappling with population growth which it finds “unbelievably challenging”.
“It’s by far in a way one of the greatest challenges. It’s this unplanned development of mainly informal communities and structures. It takes so long to plan a major infrastructure project. If you want to build a new pipeline or a new wastewater works it takes years of planning and raising of funds and yet, if the expansion of the city is just rolling at a compounding rate, then you are just always playing catch up.”
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