Cape Town: Member of the Mayoral Committee for Human Settlements – Councillor Carl Pophaim stated that the City of Cape Town is concerned that President Cyril Ramaphosa’s State of the Nation promise for increased affordable housing funding is yet to materialise.
According to Pophaim the City of Cape Town hopes to see increased funding channelled to the Social Housing Regulatory Authority (SHRA) in the coming medium-term budget policy statement. This is necessary to ignite the affordable housing sector in the country’s biggest urban centres.
Carl Pophaim further stated that the City of Cape Town is pioneering efforts to enable greater social and affordable housing delivery. This aimed at households earning between R1,850 and R32,000 per month. Immense progress has been made in this term of office, with more land released for social housing than in the past 10 years prior under the Priority Programme to accelerate affordable housing.
Reportedly, the Cape Town projects feature strongly in the national pipeline, but a constrained funding and red tape is making it harder for developers to deliver viable projects at scale and pace, with national strategies lagging behind the reality of what is needed on the ground.
In over last two years, the officials have sped forward in the enabling and support of social and affordable housing developments on well-located land in urban centres across the metro areas, such as:
- Woodstock
- Salt River
- Maitland
- Pinelands
- Zonnebloem
- Parow
- Goodwood
- Bellville, and others.
Pophaim said that such an affordable housing pipeline of 12,000 well-located units have been developed across the city on 21 valuable land parcels. Thes were released in the important urban nodes. Now they need the President to make good and fulfill his SONA promises, while also ensuring more funding to really ignite the affordable housing sector nationally.
Councillor Carl Pophaim also mentioned that now they need the national government to really come to the party. A metro cannot change the face of housing delivery on its own.
While the Cape Town administration is highly effective in delivery according to the funding that they do receive, for instance spending the majority of the human settlements budgets where it is intended to go, the resource constraints, lack of budget pipelines at a national level are major hurdles to the game-changing interventions that they have brought in.