Overall, to enable development in our city and plan for future growth, Cape Town is investing an SA-record R39.5-billion in infrastructure over the next three years. For perspective, this is more than all three Gauteng metros combined.
Cape Town is working harder than any South African city to drive well-located affordable housing, close to economic opportunity and amenities.
This fact stands in stark contrast to a falsehood often repeated by a particular civil grouping: that the metro “prioritises peripheral development” and “provides housing on the outskirts of the city, far from jobs, services and opportunities”.
Read more: Bromwell ruling highlights urgent need for reform in Cape Town’s displacement crisis
In just over two years since we launched an accelerated land release programme for affordable housing, we have released 11 land parcels set to yield over 5,500 units. That is more than the 10 years prior to that combined, where 2,800 units were released.
Overall, 12,000 affordable housing units are now in the pipeline, and the city is – at an unprecedented pace – strategically releasing municipal land for mixed-use development.
Absolutely none of these sites are on “the periphery” as falsely claimed. All are close to important economic nodes where affordable accommodation, public transport and amenities need to be concentrated.
Aside from the main City Bowl CBD, Cape Town has various major economic centres spread out across the designated “urban core”, including the metro’s “second CBD” Bellville, Century City, Montague Gardens, Paarden Island and the south-east corridor linking Khayelitsha and Mitchells Plain with Claremont and Wynberg.
Well-located development
All of the metro’s affordable housing plans, our five-year IDP strategic plan, and policy suite are geared towards enabling well-located development in this core area.
Overall, to enable development in our city and plan for future growth, Cape Town is investing an SA-record R39.5-billion in infrastructure over the next three years. For perspective, this is more than all three Gauteng metros combined.
In addition to the direct realisation of the city’s housing need, a full 75% of the city’s infrastructure spending directly benefits lower-income households. In 24/25, this R9-billion “pro-poor” portion alone exceeds the entire infrastructure budget of any other city in South Africa.
Investments include critical sewer, water, electricity and road infrastructure for a growing city, as well as major public transport projects such as the R6-billion MyCiTi bus route expansion to connect Khayelitsha, Mitchells Plain and various other communities with reliable transport to Claremont and Wynberg.
This will complement the existing MyCiTi N2 Express route from these communities to the CBD, which is among the busiest routes in the metro.
The city is further developing detailed business plans to restore passenger rail as the backbone of Cape Town’s public transport system, with a vision to work with other spheres of government to massively scale up passenger numbers, new train sets, new routes and to upgrade stations and surrounding areas with affordable housing.
In contrast to the stale claim that no social rental housing has been built in central Cape Town or well-located areas, some examples of completed developments include:
- Maitland Mews (204 units) in central Cape Town, mere minutes from the CBD;
- Conradie Park Phase 1 (1,100 units), a Western Cape government-led project in the inner-city feeder suburb of Pinelands, is set to yield more than 3,600 affordable units;
- Belhar CBD (629 social rental units), another provincial-led project where an affordable community context of more than 4,000 units is being created around key education institutions; and
- Bothasig Gardens (434 units) and Goodwood Station (1,000 units), both close to the major economic nodes of Century City and Montague Gardens.
In the inner city specifically, the city has released six land parcels with a yield of more than 4,000 units, largely in Woodstock, Salt River and Maitland.
In December 2024, the city also greenlit a public participation process to release prime municipal property in Green Point for mixed-use development, including affordable housing, at 1 Three Anchor Bay Road, close to the V&A Waterfront.
The metro will play an enabling role in major provincial government projects in the inner city, at Founders’ Garden in the CBD (2,000 units) where we will also contribute significantly financially, at the “Tafelberg” site in Sea Point, and Helen Bowden Nurses Home (Green Point), among others.
Helen Bowden – with city-owned Woodstock Hospital – are large projects with favourable conditions for social housing development. Unfortunately, both of these properties were subject to orchestrated and well-publicised building hijackings in March 2017, billed as “civil disobedience”, with subsequent calls to “sustain and build” the illegal occupation.
These were clearly not organic occupations as a result of gentrification, as claimed disingenuously by Dr Cogger. In fact, Reclaim the City “lost control” of the situation and cannot account for the personal circumstances nor the total number of unlawful occupants.
High court order
In October 2018, the Western Cape High Court granted the city an order interdicting and restraining Reclaim the City from “inciting persons to enter or be upon the property for the purpose of unlawfully occupying or invading”.
For four years, this illegal act has stalled social housing developments at both of these impeccably located inner sites, which were announced as social housing projects prior to the building hijackings.
The real victim of these unlawful hijackings is not the city. The real victims are the many potential beneficiaries and future residents at these sites. For their sakes, we must and will doggedly follow all lengthy court processes to restore these properties for proper, lawful social housing development.
Subsidy funding
The sum total of the city’s efforts is seen in the number of Cape Town projects featuring strongly in the national Social Housing Regulatory Authority (SHRA) pipeline for subsidy funding, with Cape Town emerging as the leader nationally for forthcoming affordable housing projects.
However, national government subsidies have frustratingly not kept pace with inflation over the past decade, nor have they been sufficient to really catalyse viable social housing development at scale nationally.
Subsidy funding remains extremely constrained and is a serious potential handbrake to the thousands of affordable units that Cape Town is capable of delivering in the coming years. We therefore welcome President Cyril Ramaphosa’s Sona announcement to improve state subsidies for affordable housing, and hope to see this reflected in the national budget.
The city further hopes to see momentum on our longstanding call for the national government to release its well-located mega-properties in Cape Town with an estimated yield of around 100,000 affordable housing units, including several military bases, and portions of the Parliamentary Village.
This land – which is some of the largest and best-located in the metro – is vital given that Cape Town’s Human Settlements Needs Register (the so-called “housing waiting list”) currently stands at over 450,000 individuals in a metro of close to five million people, including 850 informal settlements.
To give everyone on the register a free house would cost the state R126-billion at current rates, but national state subsidies for “free” housing to the poorest allow for only around 3,000 units per annum.
This is never enough to meet demand, despite Cape Town spending 99% of all grant funding since 2020 and notwithstanding years of dwindling subsidies and a R107-million cut in 2023/24 alone as part of nationwide austerity measures.
It is time governments around SA were honest that the state provision of free housing for all who need it is simply not financially achievable. That is why we have begun to focus recently so strongly on enabling far greater private sector delivery of affordable housing. We have introduced new guidelines to discount municipal land released for social good, alongside a range of incentives and support for micro-developers to build safe, compliant, affordable units in areas of highest demand.
Aside from constrained subsidies for affordable housing, so-called “emergency housing” for those who face eviction (the vast majority of which are private evictions and have nothing to do with the city) is not subsidised by the national government at all.
In all these cases, the city has to find and provide land as and when it is required for this purpose.
In 2024, the city was called on to make 1,785 housing offers to the courts in private eviction matters, and there are currently 105 cases of unlawfully occupied municipal land.
Bromwell Street, social and emergency housing
Given these volumes of cases, it is clear that it is not financially feasible for Cape Town – nor any municipality in South Africa – to provide alternative accommodation for private evictions in the location of the evictees’ choice, as was the demand of the applicants in the Bromwell Street matter recently before the Constitutional Court.
Accommodating demands such as this would be financially ruinous for municipalities and would absorb entire state housing budget allocations. This would effectively stop all other spending on public housing.
In the Bromwell matter, the Constitutional Court fortunately recognised this impossibility, confirming that the Constitution does not guarantee a person a right to emergency housing in the location of their choice at state expense.
The court further noted the city’s devotion to affordable housing and land release, cautioning the city about dedicating too much of its attention and resources to the social housing aspect of its programme at the expense of “emergency housing” in the inner city. This warning is well noted. It must also be clearly understood that where inner-city land is instead used for emergency accommodation, this will be at the expense of social housing.
The city also accepts the court’s guidance with respect to the need for a policy (over and above the Housing Act and Code) regarding offers of temporary emergency accommodation, which must take into account a range of factors personal to the occupants, including any prior legal right to tenure that was in place.
The realisation of the right to progressive housing in Cape Town is multifaceted, but inevitably relies fundamentally on state funding, access to land, and a capable municipality.
Notwithstanding the limitations of funding and suitable well-located municipal land, Cape Town is driving spatial transformation in the affordable housing space at an unprecedented pace and at the same time investing far more in enabling infrastructure than any other city in South Africa.
Our long-term vision is to build a city of hope for all, and well-located affordable housing along public transport routes close to economic opportunity is right at the centre of this. DM
Geordin Hill-Lewis is the Mayor of Cape Town.