The City of Cape Town announced earlier this year that it has 12 000 affordable housing units in the pipeline. Here GroundUp explains what the City means by affordable housing, where these homes will be built and when.
The need for affordable housing in Cape Town is enormous. There are more than 400 000 people on its housing waiting list, and half of households in Cape Town earn less than R20 700 a month .
For more than a decade, housing activists from Ndifuna Ukwazi and Reclaim the City have called on the City of Cape Town and the Western Cape Government to build affordable housing in the inner city to counter apartheid spatial planning and put a stop to rapid gentrification. They have obtained court judgments compelling the government to prioritise affordable housing when selling off state-owned land.
In 2022 , Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis announced an accelerated land release programme, through which City-owned land would be developed into affordable housing. In the last two years, eleven City-owned land parcels have been released for affordable housing. But construction has not yet started on any of these sites.