Our housing and spatial strategy needs radical change
HUMAN settlements have been one of the successful delivery areas of the Anc-led government post-apartheid.
In 2014, the ANC reported that it had built more than 3.3 million houses and transferred half a million public rental houses with a supply of clean water and electricity accompanying these integrated human settlements.
The challenges remain though, especially for a sprawling, urbanising country such as South Africa.
Two years before the fifth democratic national elections, 13% of South Africans continue to live in informal settlements, with the highest concentration in North West, Gauteng and the Western Cape.
We see the migration of people from the rural areas to urban and peri-urban areas contributing significantly to the mushrooming of informal settlements.
The same household survey conducted by Statistics South Africa showed 83% of whiteheaded households lived in formal dwellings with six rooms or more whereas only 35% of Africanheaded households did.
On average, white-headed households had nine rooms and African-headed households only five.
So white-headed household dwellings on average are double the size of those headed by Africans. This indicates the continued disparities of the past despite the significant progress made in introducing formal dwellings.
These disparities are evidenced not only in the size of dwellings but also whether the dwellings are state-subsidised, headed by children or by females. Female-headed households are said to be more likely to be statesubsidised than male-headed households.
The question of statesubsidised housing came into the spotlight given the quality of these houses. On average 15% of respondents of the household survey had problems with the quality of their house, either in respect of their roof or walls. Eastern Cape respondents replied mostly about the quality of state housing, whereas respondents from Gauteng complained the least.
Given only 15% of respondents complained about the quality of state housing, what it suggests is that quality is not as much of a challenge when we discuss “affordable low cost housing”.
Rather there is an aversion to what this low-cost housing will do to the value of surrounding property and the changes it will bring in the demographics of the area.
In other words, objections to affordable, state-subsidised, low-cost housing means more working-class, black people coming into the area. Hence the slow pace for integrated human settlements.
This sentiment, of keeping poor black people out, was evidently displayed in the judgment passed by the Western Cape High Court against the residents of Bromwell Street in the suburb of Woodstock.
Acting Judge Leslie Weinkove said in court that he believes when people are unemployed and have no spending power, they did not deserve to live near schools or public transport routes. He questioned why unemployed people should be living near the city.
Said Judge Weinkove in his judgment: “… where you have got a person who is not working, who has not got an income, what do you do? What is the point of them being near a school? What is the point of them needing transport? Where are they going to go? They have not even got money to spend anything.”
A just urban plan suggests the opposite of what Judge Weinkove believes. The poor or working-class should live closer to amenities and opportunities of work than those who can afford to live on the peripheries and who can afford to travel in every day.
Instead, Judge Weinkove perpetuates apartheid thinking in evicting poor black people from the city, as the apartheid government did with the community of District Six, by throwing them to the outskirts of the city. The poor are not to be seen or heard from.
Judge Weinkove’s judgment and thinking thrives in a city and province like Cape Town and the Western Cape, where the provincial government has been fighting tooth and nail to keep poor black people out of the city surrounds. Vast areas of Bo-kaap and Green Point have seen projects of gentrification with poor neighbours often being forced out of the area in order to sell their properties for astronomical prices.
Patricia de Lille, the executive mayor of the City of Cape Town, also believes that class plays a role in where one lives. In South Africa, where class and race are intertwined, De Lille believes that “… if you want to choose where you want to live, then unfortunately you have to pay for it yourself… ”
In a city and province run by a party which believes that the poor must be kept out, the poor, who are in the main black, will always be pushed to the outback of the city; far from everything especially opportunities.
This is also seen in the Western Cape government’s handling of the sale of the Tafelberg site in the suburb of Sea Point. Adamant that the provincial government was not interested in cultivating the site into a development for low-cost housing, the sale went through despite protestation from the national government and local civic groups.
In particular, the Treasury, with new Finance Minister Malusi Gigaba, condemned the sale, given that proceeds were cited to fund administrative offices instead of more pressing social needs such as integrated human settlements in the city and province.
It’s worth noting the Treasury previously always praised the city and Western Cape government.
Research in 2007 by Charlotte Lemanski, titled “Global Cities in the South: Deepening Social and Spatial Polarisation in Cape Town”, points out that despite Cape Town’s attempt to compete and be recognised as a global city, its contradiction in empowering through local economic development at municipal level on the one hand and their eviction of the people who should be reaping the benefits of this development, hamper access and success to these local economic development initiatives.
Therefore, the research suggests that part of the drastic rise in property value in areas surrounding the CBD and the subsequent “cleansing” of the city of people such as the residents of Bromwell Street or the refusal to accommodate working-class black people in Tafelberg is because the large investments going into the CBD where residents and workers already benefit from existent opportunities. Yet hardly any investment, comparative to the inner city, is made into areas on the outskirts of the city.
Heading to its 54th national conference, the ANC is suggesting a more efficient regulatory framework for integrated human settlements. However, it must ensure not to fall prey, as we have in the past 23 years, to the building of houses on the outskirts of cities, making settlements neither integrated nor accessible to opportunities.
As national, provincial and local government competencies, the ANC government at a national level must in this second phase of the transition demand that radical economic transformation is translated into investments into areas where people live rather than maintaining investments into areas formed by apartheid’s spatial planning.
• Sayed is chairperson of the ANC Youth League in the Western Cape.