Owning a home but a dream for many

Only 15 to 20 percent of households are able to participate in the private property market

went well beyond “service delivery”.

Even fully meeting residents’ basic services needs would leave the structural legacy of planning and law, and their combined economic consequences, largely unaddressed.

It would only be through finding ways to disrupt or re-engineer the spatial structure of the city, he said, that Cape Town could hope to bridge its stark socio-economic divide. And, in the wake of elections which affirmed the DA’s position, now was the perfect time to embrace this challenge.

Pieterse agreed that the “tale of two cities trope… hides a lot of variation, complexity and change since 1994”, and that “I get that it’s unfair and unhelpful” to conflate inequality with racism.

“But to suggest the city (true for all South African settlements) is not profoundly divided – predominantly around class, but given our history, class and race do coincide – or that it is changing, is to fundamentally miss some important structural dynamics.”

Neither the market, nor existing regulatory instruments, were sufficient to the task, he believed.

The history of the city form was salutary, and fundamental to exploring solutions.

“In 1994 you had a crystalisation of both colonial and apartheid regulation and plan- ning, and a strong imaginary that racial divisions had to underpin where people lived, how they moved, where they worked, where business could settle and so on.”

This was a “confluence” of “racial imagination and what has been termed modernist functionalism”, the planning conventions of post-war reconstruction in Britain, Europe and the US which asserted that the best way to plan was to have functional categories and clear distinctions in cities.

This meant “a place for business, a place for residence, a place for other infrastructure, and all of them kept functionally separate in order to optimise efficiencies”.

This welled from mass consumption, suburbanisation and Fordism (after mass car producer Henry Ford), “and that came together with the racial imagination in South Africa”.

The result was small urban cores with sprawling suburbs for rich and poor, “structured by massive dividers, mainly road and rail services”.

“That gets overlaid with a mobility system that assumes the car is king, as the ultimate symbol of modernity and middle-class advancement”.

By 1994, Cape Town and other South African cities were “an acute material expression” of this.

The greater problem, in a way, was that since 1994, this spatial form, far from being eroded, had been consolidated, for two main reasons.

“One is that the redistributive public policy to deal with shelter poverty – free housing – inadvertently worsens the situation, because the only place to access land to execute that policy is at the periphery, which exacerbates sprawl and takes the poor even further from economic opportunities.

“The second is the incredible real estate boom South Africa has experienced since 1996, at rates of growth that exceed the global norm, and any other sector.

“The effect is that those in the system, owning a property asset, saw a massive increase in their asset base, and part of the growing racialised inequality comes back to that.”

The nett result, despite attempts to change it, was that “both the market dynamic and public policy for the poor have further split the residential property market, worsening inequality”.

Pieterse identified “two big structural drivers” that could make a difference in “changing households’ opportunities to access better-located land”.

“One is employment. If you don’t have income, you cannot participate in the residential market that requires payment of rates or rents. But if we accept that 25 percent of labour is unemployed and is unlikely to get employment any time soon, that means a quarter of the population is stuck.

“Second, if we look at the nature of the private property market, and consider the costs of an entry-level house relative to income distribution, you can see majority of the working population cannot afford to access that market.”

Census data from 2011 showed that 61.5 percent of Cape Town households earned less than R12 800 a month, “and we know that even with income of up to R16 000 it is very difficult to access affordable housing, because of banks’ lending threshold, and limited government resources and facilities for people in this bracket”.

Thus, even for most of those who had jobs, access to the housing market was “blocked”.

“What all this means is that only between 15 and 20 percent of households are able to participate in the private property market.”

This, in turn, meant that if Cape Town hoped to make any headway in creating a fairer, safer and more socially and economically sustainable city, it would have to craft new, innovative regulatory instruments and policies, generate consensus around them, and create a framework capable of focusing the energies of the private and public sectors, civil society, and professional and academic expertise on finding solutions.

“Service delivery is your core business. It’s crucial and it needs the kind of single-minded attention that the city reflects on it, but it cannot be the sum total of the problem in making the city. You don’t get pats on the back for doing that.

“We can have 100 percent access to basic services for everyone in the city – and we are close, we’re abo ve 90 percent for most services– but that does not change spatial inequality.”

What was needed was “a very different conversation”.

Edgar Pieterse, director of the African Centre for Cities at UCT.