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Addressing homelessness and the housing crisis in Cape Town 'requires a holistic approach with intense state intervention'

Addressing homelessness and the housing crisis in Cape Town 'requires a holistic approach with intense state intervention'
Lerato Mutsila
By Lerato Mutsila
16 Aug 2024
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During a lively Daily Maverick webinar, civil society activists and the Cape Town mayor had a robust discussion on the ins and outs of the housing and homelessness crisis in the City of Cape Town.

“We had 350 years of very direct, intentional state action to build a housing system that benefits the white minority at the expense of the black and coloured majority, and we’re going to need similarly intense and direct state intervention if we’re ever going to overcome that. If we want to address homelessness at its root cause, then we need to build as much affordable housing in well-located areas as we possibly can to ensure that the wealth and benefits of our city are more evenly distributed,” Ndifuna Ukwazi researcher Nick Budlender said during a Daily Maverick webinar on Thursday, 15 August, 2024.

Budlender was in conversation with City of Cape Town Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis, housing and land activist and founding member of Reclaim the City Nkosikhona Swartbooi, and Daily Maverick Journalist Tamsin Metelerkamp in a lively debate about the housing and homelessness crisis in Cape Town. 

This comes after Metelerkamp wrote an eye-opening series of articles, embedding herself in unhoused communities of the metro, and civil society movements Reclaim the City and Ndifuna Ukwazi’s Mother City documentary, which expose the depth of spatial apartheid and the realities and challenges facing unhoused people.

Starting the webinar, Metelerkamp said The Cost of Homelessness Cape Town report put the number of people living on the street in Cape Town at just over 14,000, “So it becomes very important for us to have these conversations where we talk about what’s working and what isn’t working when it comes to addressing these issues,” Metelerkamp said.

Economic hardships


Access to affordable housing has been a long-standing issue within the City of Cape Town, with many people, primarily black and coloured, being forced to live in far-flung areas outside the city, and economic hardships and a host of societal issues driving people to live on the streets or occupy public spaces within the city. This is an issue the City has previously responded to by policing homelessness and forcing evictions.

However, Budlender did acknowledge that the City’s approach to the matter has changed thanks to pushback and engagement with Reclaim the City and Ndifuna Ukwazi.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=giof5_eXiA8

“When I first started doing this work about eight years ago, the most common approach was for the metro police and private security officers to round up people experiencing homelessness and drop them off on the outskirts of the city with their belongings. That’s no longer the kind of thinking and practice that the City is primarily pursuing,”

This was echoed by Mayor Hill-Lewis, who said that the City of Cape Town was prioritising ensuring unhoused people had alternative accommodation over policing people who live on the streets and forcing evictions. According to the mayor, the city was spending R253-million on the Safe Space Programmes over the next three years. The budget was used for accommodation and various programmes run at the facilities, including social work, training and the provision of healthcare.

Developmental measures


The mayor added that the money the City spent on developmental measures far outweighed what was spent on punitive measures such as law enforcement, evictions and waste management.

“I can very confidently say that our spending on those care interventions outstrips that many times over. I cannot think of any other place in South Africa that’s spending a quarter of a billion rand on safe spaces and all of the developmental and social assistance programmes that get offered there, which are really quite extraordinary. And I think we can be very proud of those,” Hill-Lewis said.

For Swartbooi, addressing homelessness and inequity in access to affordable housing is more than just about building brick-and-mortar houses and shelter. It also involves addressing the root causes that force people to end up on the streets, which requires a multi-departmental approach, from law enforcement to social development.

“There are so many complexities with the homelessness issue, a lot of departments need to be brought in to address it. It’s got to do with correctional services. What happens when someone is released from jail, and they have nowhere to go?  So, the City also has a role to play in ensuring sustainable, long-term solutions in terms of housing for the homeless community. Social services (need to play a role, too). There are issues that affect people socially in where they stay that lead them into homelessness. There are issues of mental health, there are issues of gender-based violence, issues of human trafficking. This is what  Ndifuna Ukwazi and Reclaim the City have been saying: it’s not enough to build homeless shelters only,” Swartbooi said.

Fast-tracking affordable housing


However, Budlender added that creating alternative accommodation for the unhoused was a step in the right direction, but the intervention could not end there. 

“Experts that work on homelessness argue that we need a sort of continuum moving from safe spaces with very low barriers to entry into some sort of more stable residential housing and then finally into permanent housing,” Budlender said.

According to him, building affordable housing in the inner city of Cape Town was instrumental to undoing the legacy of apartheid. This sentiment was echoed by land and housing activist Swartbooi, who lamented how long the process was taking.

“It’s been 30 years since the end of apartheid, and 15 of those 30 years in Cape Town have been governed by Mayor Hill-Lewis’ party. Till this day, there hasn’t been any unit of affordable housing built in the inner city of Cape Town. Since the dawn of democracy, we haven’t seen any public housing in the inner city of Cape Town.”

Swartbooi said that while there had been progress in the building of affordable housing developments in places like Salt River, projects in the inner city remained in the pipeline.

“We need to remind Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis that a plan with no budget and timelines is actually (just) another political speech, which will get us to the next 30 years with no affordable housing or tangible housing that we can point to. We need to realise that people do not live in pipelines. People need actual housing for them to stay in, in safe spaces,” Swartbooi said.

Red tape


The Cape Town mayor denied that the red tape in the Municipal Asset Transfer Regulations makes it hard to get land through the system out to market at a discounted rate on which affordable housing can be built. 

“We want to make sure that there is an accelerated supply of affordable housing in the market that can reasonably supply housing to all those looking for it in the city.

“What I have learned about social housing is that it’s unbelievably complex and difficult to actually get through the system. I often say that South Africa has regulations made for the wealthiest Norwegian town, which we have to try to apply in a developing world context with enormous poverty and development challenges.”

Hill-Lewis said that the City of Cape Town released more parcels of land in the past two years than in the previous 10 years.

“For the first time in South Africa, we’ve codified the rules in our council, uh, kind of policy documents as to how we will discount the land all the way down to zero, if necessary so that we can get the maximum possible social housing,” Hill-Lewis said.

National government a stumbling block


While the City of Cape Town is making progress in making affordable housing available, the national government is becoming a barrier to some of the progress that has been secured in the metro. Budlender said chaos in the National Department of Human Settlements was hindering what the City could actually do.

“Just to emphasise how badly delivery is crashing: there’s only one project getting funding approval for Cape Town in the last financial year, and only three, about 2,000 or 3,000 social housing apartments being approved with funding across the entire country,” Budlender said.

The Ndifuna Ukwazi researcher added that the national government was increasingly diverting a limited amount of resources to peripheral projects that don't necessarily restructure cities, rather than funding social housing within economic centres.

Budlender said social housing was the only housing programme that targeted integration, desegregation, and the reversal of spatial apartheid. Other sorts of housing, such as Breaking New Ground (BNG) and RDP houses, were generally very peripheral, which had often trapped people in poverty because it limited their access to well-located areas and all of the various benefits that they provided.

“What it feels like is that no matter how many political pronouncements are made, no matter how many policies are developed, no matter how many big national laws are passed, it appears that there’s very little commitment at a national level to really address the legacy of spatial apartheid, and you use the only mechanism that actually exists to do so,” Budlender said.

“I want to urge the national government to properly fund and support this programme so that dozens of projects across the country can be unblocked and provide much-needed affordable housing in areas where people were evicted. Social housing is necessary, both from the perspective of justice and decency, but also from the perspective of economic productivity as opposed to the sort of dysfunctional spatial form where people live so far from jobs,” Budlender said. DM

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