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South Africa |
SOCIAL CONDITIONS
The urban poor in South Africa continue to be evicted
from squatter dwellings,
despite a constitutional court
ruling in favour of enforcing socio-economic
rights
Most of the evictions are carried out on behalf of more affluent residents, who complain to local authorities that there is a connection in crime increase and the presence of the squatters. They also cite a possible decrease in property rates. In the landmark Grootboom case in the year 2000, the court said the State had an obligation to implement an effective housing plan to assist destitute communities.
The government has conceded that rising community impatience with the slow pace of land and housing delivery programmes, is behind the several «land invasions» the country has witnessed. Moses Mushi, spokesperson for Thoko Didiza, the Minister of Land Affairs, said the department’s national land redistribution programme had been put on hold since Didiza replaced Derek Hanekom in June 1999, pending a review of land reform policies.
The reviewed policy places emphasis on «quality projects», breaking from Hanekom’s policy of parcelling out urban land without necessarily having first provided infrastructure and financial support. But the revised approach is proceeding slowly. To rectify this, the department had introduced a fast-track process that aimed to reduce the completion time of new housing projects from six to two.
Housing crisis
Providing adequate housing has been one of the hardest campaign policies to fulfil for the seven-year African National Congress (ANC) government in South Africa. The scale of the crisis is immense.
The lack of adequate housing and basic services in urban townships and rural settlements in South Africa today, has reached crisis proportion, with some seven million people estimated to be living as squatters. South Africa has a housing backlog estimated at between three to four million, increasing by 150,000 units per year.
The urban housing backlog alone is estimated at about 1.5 million units. and according to Nicky Smith, a community development worker, unless there is a dramatic increase in the pace of urban housing delivery, the housing backlog could increase at a rate of 178,000 a year.
If South Africa is to get rid of all informal housing within 10 years, the government will have to double its housing budget from the current R3.3 billion, says Housing Minister Sankie Mthembi-Mahanyele. (In January 2002, one US dollar was equivalent to about 11.80 Rands).
When the ANC was elected in 1994, there were promises galore of delivering one million fully serviced, brick-and mortar homes over a five-year period. Although the figure has been attained, it has been at the cost of quality.
Subsidised housing
The Housing Department has taken steps to improve the quality of homes and to protect consumers by requiring builders to register with the government. «The fact that only 365 out of 9,465 registered builders had been deregistered for failure to meet quality and other obligations, was heartening, but even such a small number tarnished the image of the sector as a whole», says Sankie Mthembi-Mahayele. She said the Housing Department would continue to weed out those who could not meet certain standards.
The Department has also promoted a savings-linked subsidy scheme to provide a housing incentive to people who save money to complement their subsidies.
Subsidised housing is one of the cornerstones of the government’s policy to provide housing. Households with a joint income of R800 or less, are eligible for a housing grant of R15, 000, whereas at the top end, households with a joint income of R2,501 to R3,500, only qualify for a R5,000 grant.
Builders say that for R15,000, after varying site servicing costs, they can provide only a single-roomed house using conventional methods. A building firms such as Murray and Roberts, says its units would be up to 10 m2 in size; Grinakar provides three options: a 40 m2 roof structure with an enclosed toilet, a 20m2 room with an outside toilet, or a 20m2 room with enclosed toilet on the newer schemes.
Though varying site servicing costs are the obvious problem, a way forward is to spread across the country in the national housing budget, any shortfall incurred by some local authorities following a standard housing type. Local authorities, with their new-found authority, could absorb trade service costs such as water, sewerage and electricity.
The Department is also speeding the processing of subsidies allocated to the self-building programme. Out of the 1.2 million government housing subsidies in the past seven years, 11,000 went to people who built their own homes.
Low income group
South Africa’s enormous housing shortage is most acute among the low income group. It is estimated that about 1.7 million households in South Africa live in shacks on unserviced land, while 700,000 shacks are on serviced sites.
An average low-cost house on a serviced site provided by the formal construction sector costs R30,000. This is far too expensive for most South Africans.
South Africa’s housing environment was in disarray at the beginning of the 1990s, with seven ministries and departments of housing; 13 statutory housing funds; and more than 60 national and regional parastatals involved in housing. There were as many as 20 different subsidy systems, and the construction industry was depleted from a length recession. An abysmal number of low-cost houses — thousands of them — were delivered under the apartheid government.
According to urban trends, South African cities and big towns, are growing at a rate of 200,000 households (approximately five people per household) a year. Finding the money to build the houses is not the problem. The government has established a range of financial, institutional, technical and logistical support mechanisms to help communities improve their housing circumstances.
For example, in return for mortgage guarantees from the government, financial institutions are expected to provide lending to low income households. Despite pressure from the government, the banking industry has been slow in lending to the low-income market. «Banks are reluctant to lend money to those who earn low wages because of the high risk of them defaulting on repayments», says Allan Ratcliffe, a mortgage finance consultant with a leading bank. In a bid to address this, the government has created the National Housing Finance Corporation to lend money to poor people.
Another problem is that many provinces underspend on their housing budgets. While 322,638 houses were built or under construction in 1997/98, this declined to 170,883 in the year 2000. Levels in the current financial year (2001-2002) look set to remain the same.
It’s clear that both the national and local government have put in place several measures to speed up housing delivery to the many urban poor residents living in squalid dwellings, and rural communities whose homesteads are not strong enough to withstand adverse weather conditions. But much remains to be done and it’s essential that both levels of government appreciate each other’s role in reducing the number of people lacking a decent dwelling place.
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