http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2015/04/17/harry-stopes/the-mandela-complex/
Harry Stopes
In December 2013, a group of people living in shack settlements in Newlands West, Durban, entered and squatted a development of 16 nearly complete apartment blocks on Castle Hill, about ten miles north-west of the city centre. They stayed for more than a year before they were evicted on 17 December 2014. The developer calls the site Hilldale; the squatters called it the Mandela Complex.
Since 1994 the main government policy for housing the poor in South Africa has been to provide free homes, for private ownership, through the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP). To be eligible for an RDP home, your total household income mut be less than 3500 Rand a month. That isn’t much (currently around £200), but there are millions of South Africans who earn less, or nothing at all – a quarter of the workforce is unemployed. Around 180,000 RDP units have been built in Durban since 1994. Continue reading