Category Archives: housing policy

Rethinking the State’s Housing Programme

17 May 2012

Rethinking the State's Housing Programme: Finding a sustainable and responsive solution to the need for adequate shelter and the right to the city

by S'bu Zikode

I wish to submit and insist that it will be disastrous to commit our contributions to economic growth instead of social growth and the development of the poor. The problem with this is that economic growth for the rich often does not help the poor – sometimes it happens by oppressing the poor. We cannot continue to support the rich to get richer while the poor are getting poorer in the hope that one day the poor will also get some of this wealth. We have to start with the urgent needs of the poor – with the urgent needs that people have today.

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Witness: The problem with housing

http://www.witness.co.za/index.php?showcontent&global[_id]=58831

The problem with housing
13 Apr 2011

Cameron Brisbane

PROBLEMS associated with low-income housing provide a steady stream of news stories — defective RDP housing, households facing eviction, protests over backlogs, and then most recently, the loss of R200?million to the province due to poor delivery performance. Admittedly, much of the R200?million was returned to the province to help with rectifying or rebuilding defective houses. But, while the national bill for fixing defects stands at an estimated R58?billion, the premier went on record at a provincial summit last month to say that KwaZulu-Natal has the largest backlog for new housing in the country.

The current level of investment in subsidised housing — which the Minister of Human­ Settlements has gone on record to say is financially unsustainable — provides for 50?000 units per year. Simply put, it would take more than 20 years to clear the existing provincial backlog for new houses, and the need to repair or replace the housing stock built over the past 15 years will make the waiting game even longer.

In Msunduzi, the backlog for low-income housing stands at 16?000 units. It has been four years since there was a city-wide public forum to test the municipality’s figures, commitment and capacity to deliver its mandate. The imbizo, or so-called public consultation process, is fragmented into clusters of wards, making it impossible to engage in the problem at a city-wide level. The Turnaround Strategy for the city noted that the housing delivery unit had management problems in fulfilling its mandate, yet the municipality wishfully plans to eliminate informal settlements by 2016 without evident consideration of operational­ and financial constraints and simply a lack of available land.

It is a sobering thought when housing becomes a political football every five years, come election time. Over the past six months, there has been a flurry of activity by branch officials of the ruling party, senior provincial and municipal politicians and wannabee ward councillors, trying to fix blocked and non-performing projects that go back as far as 10 years. Where will they be this time next year?

What were the real reasons for the poor delivery performance by the KZN Department of Human Settlements? First of all, in its defence, it will say that housing is a local government mandate. This belies the fact that the province is propping up housing delivery for most local municipalities who lack inhouse capacity. Secondly, MEC Maggie Govender has most recently decried the backlogs in providing infrastructure, which has to be constructed before houses can be built, which is blamed on poor performance by the Department of Public Works.

This explanation lacks credibility. It is true that a housing subsidy — which used to be split between infrastructure and housing costs — is now 100% allocated to a bigger, better standard of house. But the MEC used to preside over both Housing and Public Works and the lack of alignment in service delivery between two separate­ departments of provincial government has dogged the housing delivery industry for years before her tenure.

Many other reasons for slow delivery have been cited: conditions attached to environmental-impact assessments caused the previous minister, Lindiwe Sisulu, to protest that the nation’s housing needs could not be held to ransom by environmentalists chasing butterflies.

The Department of Human Settlements has expressed concern at industry practices of banking projects and fronting. Both are symptoms of the profit motive clashing head-on with the fact that housing delivery is over-regulated and places far too much of a burden on emerging contractors who do not have the requisite skills and capacity to manage highly complex functions that can only be performed by multidisciplinary teams of professionals. Low-income housing is a low-profit, high-risk industry, and hence unattractive to emerging companies trying to keep their heads above water, as well as established consulting and contracting firms who can make millions out of prestigious, and often questionable, developments.

Many implementing agents are now — and not for the first time — being threatened with legal action for building defective houses. One industry stalwart spoke at a provincial summit last month about the problems of building anything in the late nineties and early part of this decade, when the value of a housing subsidy was only escalated by 6,6% over a period of seven­ years. The introduction of minimum standards for RDP housing in 1999 did not improve matters, it simply forced some speculators out of the market — including some of the largest construction companies in the country — and resulted in a decline in numbers of houses built.

It is equally unfair of the Department of Human Settlements to solely blame contractors for the poor-quality housing that was built. Where were the department’s inspectors, without whose signature on a certificate the contractor would not be paid? The department has acknowledged some responsibility and mumbled about possible disciplinary action against rogue inspectors, but that does not equate to a national rectification bill of R58?billion.

There are some simple solutions and some more difficult ones to this myriad of obstacles and addressing the nation’s housing needs. In terms of procurement, the province should cease its reliance on turnkey contracting, which imposes undue risk on an emerging industry, and take direct responsibility for managing the delivery process. This will leave contractors to focus on what they should aspire to — simply building. A few engineers and quantity surveyors, which as the MEC indicated are being recruited inhouse, is woefully inadequate to perform.

The challenges of relaxing regulations would then fall away. Former minister in the RDP office, Jay Naidoo, commented at the end of his term that the government had failed to recognise it was not equipped to deliver when all it knew was how to regulate. We face the same dilemma today.

Most importantly, there needs to be a coherence in addressing needs and, aligning the resources to release land, provide infrastructure and build houses and communities with access to jobs and amenities. There is insufficient land to meet the needs of our rapidly urbanising towns and cities, in spite of the government establishing the Housing Development Agency over two years ago. In this city, communities have been told for over a decade not to build permanent structures as they are going to be relocated. When and to where?

We continue to condemn poor communities, who can ill afford the costs of commuting to town to work or seek work, to peripheral townships like France. Is that a solution for 20?000 households that have no work, no house and no future? The time is ripe for a housing summit in the city to bring a sense of transparency and rationality, but let us do it after the elections, when all the hype has blown over

The Policy Context for Informal Settlements: Competitiveness, Slum Eradication and a Right to the City?

The Policy Context for Informal Settlements: Competitiveness, Slum Eradication and a Right to the City?

by Marie Huchzermeyer, Trialog, 2011

Since the mid-1990s, policy makers and economic analysts have increasingly emphasised “competitiveness” at urban, regional and national levels (Turok, 2004). This trend responded to economic globalisation – the growing mobility of capital across national borders and the removal of restrictions that would protect national markets from foreign interests (ibid.).

Since the bankruptcy of major financial institutions in the US in 2008, the world has witnessed the crumbling of liberal economic orthodoxy. Although the economic crisis has its roots in an “urban crisis” (Harvey, 2009: 1270), namely in an overly commodified and under-regulated housing finance market, we are only just beginning to see a fundamental questioning of urban policy orthodoxy.

In this paper, my particular concern is how policies for urban competitiveness treat poor urban inhabitants who are only marginally connected to the formal economy but are as mobile as people skilled for formal participation in the globalising economy. My concern is that the management of mobility in the interest of urban economic competitiveness in itself justifies the need for slum free cities. I also explore what this in turn means for a “right to the city”, a notion that very recently entered the South African policy vocabulary.

Notes from the ABM workshop in Pinetown on Sunday, 27 February 2011

Click here to see some photographs of this workshop.

Notes from the ABM workshop in Pinetown on Sunday, 27 February 2011

Speakers: Shamita Naidoo (Motala Heights) and Marie Huchzermeyer (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg)

Shamita:

Shamita found out that most of the land at Motala Heights is owned by the eThekwini Municipality and the National Housing Board but the National Housing Board didn’t even know that they have the land at Motala Heights.

Years ago, some of the land was given to the poor to make a livelihood on that land but now some of these landowners are trying to make money from that land by renting it to others and asking for high rents.

The councilor says that Motala heights cannot be developed because it is on DMOSS land. [Note: DMOSS stands for “Durban Metropolitan Open Space System” and it was previously known as “eThekwini Environmental Services Management Plan” (EESMP). DMOSS land is important for biodiversity and environmental conservation more generally.]

Last month Ricky Govender, a notorious local business man, destroyed the Nazareth temple by grading the area, claiming that it his land.It is against the law to destroy any site of religious worship (but the temple at Motala Heights was destroyed anyway).

Shamita also found out that there was a decision already in 1986 that Motala Heights should be used for Housing. But despite this decision, development never happened. It is therefore important that communities don’t wait for development to happen or to wait until Abahlali leaders start fighting for it but each community must get active and take the issue in their own hands.

Development means:
1. Roads
2. Water
3. Electricity
4. Sewage
5. Housing

Marie:

Motala Heights is a microcosm of the issues that most informal settlements face – threats of removal, pressures for land to be used for ‘more profitable’ purposes. We all need to learn from the experience Shamita shared. It seems that as soon as informal settlement communities struggle for permanent rights to land and for improved services, they make real enemies.

The Informal Settlement Upgrading Program has been designed for those situations where land has been occupied and used for other purposes than planned (according to the zoning of the municipality). The idea is that in these situations (that is: in informal settlements) in-situ upgrading is better than building RDP houses. In other words, the program acknowledges the importance of in-situ upgrading and the (national) Government’s aim is to upgrade 400,000 shacks by 2014 and every province had to commit themselves to their respective share. Originally, however, the National Housing Code 2004 stated as a goal that all shacks should be upgraded until 2014.

Obviously, 400,000 is only a small proportion of what is needed and the problem is that the poor are not included in deciding which settlements are prioritized in the upgrading. This is currently decided in a top-down process and provinces and municipalities will always choose those settlements that are easiest to upgrade, which means that it might not be the neediest ones.

Marie stresses that it is the merit of AbM that the Government committed itself to the upgrading, especially by successfully challenging the Slums Act, because in its decision, the Constitutional Court ruled that feasibility of in-situ upgrading (Chapter 13) must be checked before anything else can be done in an informal settlement. This means that eviction and relocation is not allowed unless in-situ upgrading is not possible.

However, in 2009 national Department of Housing re-wrote its Housing Code. What was Chapter 13 is now Part 4 of the 2009 Housing Code. This is available on www.dhs.gov.za. Unfortunately there is an important step backwards in the new upgrading program: in order to qualify for the ‘upgrading subsidy’, a number of formal conditions must be met. This is a step backwards because in the 2004 version, formal requirements could be suspended to the benefit all of the people who do not have IDs or other documents or for other reasons did not qualify for the subsidy. It used to be an inclusive area-based subsidy, rather than depending on the individual’s qualification for a housing subsidy,.

Another problem with the upgrading program is that municipalities use the promise of upgrading to prevent settlements growth by asking the community to prevent any new shacks to be added to the settlement or else there will be no upgrading at all. In this way, the community is easily divided and thereby weakened (as has happened in the recent case of the Hangberg settlement in Cape Town as well as earlier in Kennedy Road).

Marie asks the workshop participants how important it is to cater for growth when doing upgrading and the meeting agreed that it was important to consider especially the growth of the families that are already living there.

There are some people consultants who have suggested that informal settlement upgrading should be de-linked from the national housing subsidy and that municipal money should be used for the upgrading instead. It is then restricted to interim basic services and interim tenure rights. But the problem with that strategy is that in practice it translates into temporary solutions, not very different from being in a Temporary Relocation Area (TRA), with a certain level of basic services but still waiting for a permanent solution. The assumption in these proposals is that one day the households will move to formal housing. But there is little evidence that formal housing is rolled out in the right locations and at the right speed for this to be a promise in which people can put their trust.

The other problem is that municipalities are currently selecting a few settlements for this so-called ‘upgrading’, rather than applying the principle of investigating feasibility of permanent upgrading for every informal settlement as soon as possible. There still is a difficult struggle for most informal settlements against relocation and for in situ upgrading. This should not be the case.

Discussion:

Question regarding Intake view raised that they are also occupying the land that belongs to the private land owner. So they were asking if they could get the same maps as the Motala. Shamita advices them that she is willing to assist any community.

The workshop was then closed and Marie suggested that we need to have another such workshop to unpack some of the other issues further.

Land Rights Workshop with Marie Huchzermeyer, Pinetown, 27 February 2011

Notes from the ABM workshop in Pinetown on Sunday, 27 February 2011.

Speakers: Shamita Naidoo (Motala Heights) and Marie Huchzermeyer (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg)

Shamita:

Shamita found out that most of the land at Motala Heights is owned by the eThekwini Municipality and the National Housing Board but the National Housing Board didn’t even know that they have the land at Motala Heights.

Years ago, some of the land was given to the poor to make a livelihood on that land but now some of these landowners are trying to make money from that land by renting it to others and asking for high rents.

The councilor says that Motala heights cannot be developed because it is on DMOSS land. [Note: DMOSS stands for “Durban Metropolitan Open Space System” and it was previously known as “eThekwini Environmental Services Management Plan” (EESMP). DMOSS land is important for biodiversity and environmental conservation more generally.]

Last month Ricky Govender, a notorious local business man, destroyed the Nazareth temple by grading the area, claiming that it his land.It is against the law to destroy any site of religious worship (but the temple at Motala Heights was destroyed anyway).

Shamita also found out that there was a decision already in 1986 that Motala Heights should be used for Housing. But despite this decision, development never happened. It is therefore important that communities don’t wait for development to happen or to wait until Abahlali leaders start fighting for it but each community must get active and take the issue in their own hands.

Development means:
1. Roads
2. Water
3. Electricity
4. Sewage
5. Housing

Marie:

Motala Heights is a microcosm of the issues that most informal settlements face – threats of removal, pressures for land to be used for ‘more profitable’ purposes. We all need to learn from the experience Shamita shared. It seems that as soon as informal settlement communities struggle for permanent rights to land and for improved services, they make real enemies.

The Informal Settlement Upgrading Program has been designed for those situations where land has been occupied and used for other purposes than planned (according to the zoning of the municipality). The idea is that in these situations (that is: in informal settlements) in-situ upgrading is better than building RDP houses. In other words, the program acknowledges the importance of in-situ upgrading and the (national) Government’s aim is to upgrade 400,000 shacks by 2014 and every province had to commit themselves to their respective share. Originally, however, the National Housing Code 2004 stated as a goal that all shacks should be upgraded until 2014.

Obviously, 400,000 is only a small proportion of what is needed and the problem is that the poor are not included in deciding which settlements are prioritized in the upgrading. This is currently decided in a top-down process and provinces and municipalities will always choose those settlements that are easiest to upgrade, which means that it might not be the neediest ones.

Marie stresses that it is the merit of AbM that the Government committed itself to the upgrading, especially by successfully challenging the Slums Act, because in its decision, the Constitutional Court ruled that feasibility of in-situ upgrading (Chapter 13) must be checked before anything else can be done in an informal settlement. This means that eviction and relocation is not allowed unless in-situ upgrading is not possible.

However, in 2009 national Department of Housing re-wrote its Housing Code. What was Chapter 13 is now Part 4 of the 2009 Housing Code. This is available on www.dhs.gov.za. Unfortunately there is an important step backwards in the new upgrading program: in order to qualify for the ‘upgrading subsidy’, a number of formal conditions must be met. This is a step backwards because in the 2004 version, formal requirements could be suspended to the benefit all of the people who do not have IDs or other documents or for other reasons did not qualify for the subsidy. It used to be an inclusive area-based subsidy, rather than depending on the individual’s qualification for a housing subsidy,.

Another problem with the upgrading program is that municipalities use the promise of upgrading to prevent settlements growth by asking the community to prevent any new shacks to be added to the settlement or else there will be no upgrading at all. In this way, the community is easily divided and thereby weakened (as has happened in the recent case of the Hangberg settlement in Cape Town as well as earlier in Kennedy Road).

Marie asks the workshop participants how important it is to cater for growth when doing upgrading and the meeting agreed that it was important to consider especially the growth of the families that are already living there.

There are some people consultants who have suggested that informal settlement upgrading should be de-linked from the national housing subsidy and that municipal money should be used for the upgrading instead. It is then restricted to interim basic services and interim tenure rights. But the problem with that strategy is that in practice it translates into temporary solutions, not very different from being in a Temporary Relocation Area (TRA), with a certain level of basic services but still waiting for a permanent solution. The assumption in these proposals is that one day the households will move to formal housing. But there is little evidence that formal housing is rolled out in the right locations and at the right speed for this to be a promise in which people can put their trust.

The other problem is that municipalities are currently selecting a few settlements for this so-called ‘upgrading’, rather than applying the principle of investigating feasibility of permanent upgrading for every informal settlement as soon as possible. There still is a difficult struggle for most informal settlements against relocation and for in situ upgrading. This should not be the case.

Discussion:

Question regarding Intake view raised that they are also occupying the land that belongs to the private land owner. So they were asking if they could get the same maps as the Motala. Shamita advices them that she is willing to assist any community.

The workshop was then closed and Marie suggested that we need to have another such workshop to unpack some of the other issues further.