Let market fix housing

Jonny Steinberg’s observation about inestimable harm done to the poor by the delivery of housing over the last 25 years is a tragic truth, but to blame suburbanites is counterfactual.

The first ANC housing minister, Joe Slovo, was a communist, even if pragmatic. When the construction and finance sectors approached the ministry with a programme to help implement his white paper, he turned them away. Instead, the state was to finance, build and hand over houses in a centralist fashion, as it still does. No gearing of state spending, no community contribution other than as passive recipients, and a private sector reduced to being contractors.

More fruitful would have been to do what the government did for whites in the 1960s and 70s. First-time home buyers could access statesubsidised home loans that let them buy where it suited them. This created a ready market for developments such as Pretoria’s Sunnyside and Johannesburg’s Hillbrow.

Now the poor are forced to live where the state’s building programme dictates. It is not too late to introduce a market-based arrangement.

The government could create bespoke housing finance permitting, say, a building society to procure cheap foreign loans, get favourable tax terms and be mandated to serve the poor.

This would solve the spatial transformation challenge in a generation without endless debate on where to “distribute”. It would stimulate the self-help building industry. Informal settlements can be zones of real, formal investment.

Jens Kuhn

Cape Town