City housing backlog will take 82 years to clear
By Laea Medley
The eThekwini Municipality has a housing backlog of more than 410 000 units in the city, which, with the current government funding, will take 82 years to clear.
This is according to the draft Medium Term Revenue and Expenditure Framework, released recently by the municipality.
In light of this, the Diakonia Council of Churches in Durban hosted a stakeholders briefing to address the issue of sustainable housing.
“While we admit that some progress to alleviate this backlog has been made, many deserving residents of the city have been on the waiting list for years, running from pillar to post for houses that do not come, and not getting answers to their questions to maintain a roof over their head,” said Diakonia communications co-ordinator Kudzai Taruona.
According to Mdu Zungu, chief operations officer of the Department of Human Settlements, there are 636 informal settlements in KwaZulu-Natal, with 484 in eThekwini.
“The condition of human settlements largely determines the quality of life, the improvement of which is a prerequisite for basic needs such as employment, housing, health services and education,” he said.
Shamita Naidoo, a spokesperson from Abahlali baseMjondolo, said there was a lot of housing that had not yet been delivered, and that government had forced the organisation to look into the issue.
The Abahlali baseMjondolo (shack dwellers) movement began in Durban in 2005 and, in terms of the number of people it has mobilised, is the largest organisation of the militant poor in post-apartheid South Africa.
“There are hundreds of thousands of people out there who need homes,” said Naidoo.
“We’ve held so many marches to the municipality and they should have been taken seriously by government.”
Another challenge the government faced, said Naidoo, was that people would like to live close to the city. “There are jobs here – jobs which are hard to come by in rural areas,” she said. “People generally want to live close to industrial areas.”
To try and overcome the problem, the department is undertaking several housing programmes across the province.
“We have an informal settlement upgrade, which is built by contractors employed by municipalities, institutional programmes in which housing is built for a group of people, and consolidation programmes, which involves already-serviced stands that the government sold,” said Caroline Govender, a spokeswoman from the KZN Department of Human Settlements.
“We also have a subsidy for the physically challenged, which involves additional money given to improve houses based on special needs.”
But while housing can be built, it needs to be sustainable and include surrounding infrastructure, such as schools, hospitals, recreational facilities and a transport system.
This is according to Heather Maxwell, CEO of property developers SOHCO.
Through this NGO, Maxwell aims to provide quality residence through tenure options rather than through sale.