Housing backlog stuck on the ground floor

The South African government has spent over US$5.2 billion on housing subsidies since 1994 but is still no closer to overcoming the desperate shortage of adequate homes.

Government figures show that the housing backlog has continued to grow, even though 1.8 million subsidised houses have been built since 1994 - in 1996 the deficit stood at two million, compared to the current 2.4 million gap between demand and supply.

"The pace of homelessness and informal settlement growth in South Africa is definitely increasing; there seems to be a genuine desire to do something but there is still a long way to go," Ted Baumann, manager of uTshani Fund, an NGO that helps local communities with housing development, told IRIN.

According to the Business Day newspaper, housing minister Lindiwe Sisulu said 200,000 low-cost houses were being delivered every year but still expected the 2.4 million backlog to remain in 10 years' time. "Government would not be able to achieve its goal of eradicating informal settlement by 2014," she said.

"There is a fundamental mismatch between government's policy and reality," Baumann commented. "The main issue is that South Africa has a developing-country housing challenge [characterised by poverty and rapid urbanisation] that it tries to address through its developed-country institutions, and that doesn't work."

He said there were enough resources to tackle the problem, "but the real challenge is finding a way to accommodate formality and informality - access to subsidies is very bureaucratic and, realistically, the ability of most informal settlement dwellers [to meet the requirements] is too low."

"When people move into cities from rural areas they are often not in a position, economically or socially, to comply with the systems that are in place," Baumann explained, referring to the necessary paperwork, dealing with government officials, and the extensive rules and regulations that have to be complied with when applying for a housing subsidy.

The South African banking association estimates that about seven million of the country's 12.5 million households depend entirely on the government to provide for their housing needs, Business Day reported.