Still No Room at the Inn: Post-Apartheid Housing Policy and the Challenge of Integrating the Poor in South African Cities
By
Dr Pauline W. Adebayo
School of Architecture, Planning and Housing
University of KwaZulu-Natal
Durban 4041, South Africa
Telephone: +27 31 2602703
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ABSTRACT
Integrating the poor in the city after apartheid is an important housing policy theme in South Africa, dictated by the need for equity and social change in a democratic political dispensation. Among the key features of the apartheid government’s urban spatial policies was racially-motivated, segragatory residential development, which physically placed black South Africans in the peripheries of cities, where they were further marginalised by the political, economic and educational policies of the day. Resultantly, at the point of achieving democracy in 1994, income and a place in the city were both articulated along racial lines, with the majority blacks being the poorest, and having the least access. Post-apartheid urban policies needed to redress this, and integrate the poor in the city. Housing policy was seen to be a critical tool of such integration.
The consensus among many urban analysts however, is that despite sixteen years of post-apartheid housing delivery, the poor still live at the edges of cities and of opportunities. This, the analysts agree, constitutes a fundamental failure of one of housing policy’s central goals. The paper firstly analyses the first decade of post-apartheid housing policy implementation, and shows that certain unintended consequences of the policy have not only thwarted the integration of the poor in the city, but in fact reinforced the housing segregation patterns of the apartheid state. The paper then evaluates whether certain policy refinements, instituted to address this failure in the second decade of delivery, can better achieve the integrated city goal. In particular, it analyses the programmes aimed at achieving inclusionary housing and downmarket lending; harnessing the asset value of housing; and upgrading of informal settlements. The paper concludes that the extant challenges of integrating the poor in South African cities can only be further compounded by the current economic context, where recovery from recession is expected to be slow.
1. Introduction
It is well documented that the type of urbanisation imposed on South African cities by both the colonial and apartheid governments favoured a white minority over the majority black South Africans (Mabin, 1992, Smith, 1992). By the time democracy arrived in 1994, black[1] urban dwellers lacked citizenship in the cities and towns in which they lived, which were characterised by unequal access to space, economic opportunities and secure tenure, while over a half century of discriminatory and restrictive policies had served to consolidate their impoverishment (Wilkinson, 1998, Smith, 2003). Integrating the poor is therefore also about integrating non-whites in former ‘white’ cities.
Importantly, the planning strategies adopted during apartheid, which had placed black people in their respective ‘group areas’[2] and townships in peripheral locations made housing a key area of marginalisation and inequality in the cities.There can therefore be no doubt that making South African cities places for all and integrating the marginalised in the city was a desirable and necessary policy objective, if equity and social change were to be said to have been achieved in the post-apartheid period. Post-apartheid housing policy was key among the urban policies put in place to achieve this objective.
In a bid to demonstrate why integrating the poor in the city is an important housing policy theme, this paper begins by briefly outlining the historical background that yielded the segregated, non-inclusive cities inherited by the democratic government in 1994. It then discusses post-apartheid housing policy’s objectives in respect of restructuring such cities and integrating the poor in them. The paper then reviews housing delivery in the post-apartheid period in two phases. In reviewing the first phase, constituting the first post-apartheid decade, it explains why housing policy failed in its integrative objectives, and in effect reinforced rather than confronted the apartheid spatial and socioeconomic structure. In the second phase, the paper examines the extent to which some policy refinements that have emerged from such failure can succeed, where previous policy has failed.
2. Why are Poor Urban Dwellers Not ‘in the City’?
In line with entrenching cities as domains of white people, numerous governmental measures, including legislation and municipal controlled passes, were put in place over time, aimed at controlling the influx of blacks into, and regulating both their activities and permanence in urban areas. Those permitted in urban areas to serve white capital were, through residential segregation, forced into black townships, which were locationally and administratively separated from the social and spatial fabric of white cities. The housing and services in these townships were moreover inferior, and the housing experience of blacks worsened by the townships’ inconvenient location relative to sources of employment (Wilkinson, 1998, Smith, 2003).
The measures to regulate black urbanisation were however unsuccessful, because of the push factor of deteriorating living conditions in the reserves to which blacks (not needed in urban areas) were restricted, as well as the tide of contemporary urbanisation. New migrants were, due to their illegal presence in the urban areas, as well asthe affordability challenge of any other type of urban housing, illegally accommodated in informal housing built in the backyards of existing townships.Informal settlements also developed on the fringes of towns and cities, and their expansion was uncontrollable. By the time new township housing construction ceased altogether in the late 1960s, existing townships were bursting at the seams due to overcrowding, and their meagre services were completely overstretched(Mabin, 1992, Wilkinson, 1998).
By the mid 1970s, these untenable living conditions as well as intensified influx control, worsening unemployment and poverty and raised political activism, sparked a wave of township uprisings in 1976, through which black urban dwellers made clear their rejection of their imposed housing hardship and marginalisation (Wilkinson, 1998). In the wake of the uprisings, the government established the Urban Foundation (UF) in 1977 to address the problems of black urban communities. The UF’s response was to facilitate black housing ownership through both self-help housing and privatisation of public housing. These measures had limited success however, due to the target group’s inability to effect its demand for housing. As a result of continuing poverty. Moreover, the limited housing delivered through self-help was in peripheral locations, thereby maintaining residential segregation (Tomlinson R, 1990). To address the indicated demand-side omissions of the UF and enable blacks to acquire formal housing, a pilot scheme of once-off capital grants was put in place by a parastatal, the Independent Development Trust (IDT) in 1990, enabling acquisition by low income households of 100 000 serviced sites on which they could build their housing incrementally, using their own resources. This IDT housing delivery model of serviced sites in planned townships, funded through a capital subsidy was adopted in the post-apartheid housing policy (Huchzermeyer, 2001, Khan, 2003a).The post-apartheid model howeverincludes a 30m² starter house, dubbed the RDP[3] house in the first decade of the policy, and subsequently the BNG house[4]. It’s incremental consolidation would be the responsibility of the recipient (Department of Housing, 1994, 2004).
The IDT programme was however too limited in scale to impact both the housing deficit and the urban structure that had been decades in the making. Thus, despite its housing respite in the late apartheid period, South African cities were still highly unequitable in 1994, and the apartheid legacy of peripherisation of housing and buffer zones between races, urban isolation and poverty of black urban dwellers was carried into the post-apartheid era largely intact (Brenmer, 2000, Smith, 2003). Post-apartheid urban policies therefore needed to redress this by conferring the long-denied urban ‘citizenship’ to poor, mainly black households, and integrating them in the city.
3. Post-apartheid Housing Policy and Integrating the Poor
The goal of creating more inclusive cities in South Africa is embedded in the broader goal of urban restructuring, which is aimed at redressing the skewed spatial structure of the apartheid city and its resultant social-spatial marginalisation of the poor. It is also important for urban restructuring that the poor’s access to economic opportunities, consumption, infrastructure and social facilities be enhanced. Some of the planning interventions mooted to achieve this include mixed use activity corridors/nodes and higher density developments, aimed at achieving a more compact city (Charlton, 2001, Oelofse, 2003, Todes, 2003).
In respect of housing policy, an important goal of both the Housing White Paper (HWP) of 1994[5](Department of Housing, 1994), and the Housing Act (107 of 1997), was to reverse the housing delivery pattern that had ignored the social, environmental and economic consequences of peripheral locations for the poor. The National Urban Development Framework of 1997 (Department of Housing, 1997, Pieterse, 2003) reiterated this objective and sharpened its focus, while specifically advocating for strategies that would achieve the integrated co-location of urban functions and their efficient functioning. And while some like Oelofse(2003) have dismissed as simplistic the interpretation of this goal as the mere juxtaposition of compaction on the sprawled, fragmented, low density city and the location of new low income housing developments close to former ‘white’ residential areas, this is how the achievement of this goal was generally understood. Thus, new housing for the poor would be developed on underutilised or vacant land in the inner city or on buffer zones, while informal settlements in good locations would be legalised and upgraded.
The government itself acknowledges it’s inadvertent effect of perpetuating social, spatial and economic segregation of the poor with its huge post-apartheid housing programme. Indeed, the refinements to the first decade of policy, contained in the Breaking New Ground (BNG) policy of 2004 are aimed at addressing the first decade’s housing delivery failure in extending “existing housing areas, often on the urban periphery, thereby achieving limited integration” (Department of Housing, 2004).
The main hurdles to integrating the poor in the cityusing housing policy can be attributed to a number of important factors, whose complexities became manifest particularly in implementation. These are discussed below and include the outcome of the national housing subsidy scheme; the differing locational needs of the poor in the city; the impact of the market on policy implementation; the questionable asset value of RDP housing; and the unfamiliarity with the concept of an integrated urban form in South Africa.
- Challenges to Integrating the Poor
4.1 The Housing Subsidy Scheme
The national subsidy scheme, introduced in 1994, is considered the cornerstone of low income housing policy in South Africa. As indicated elsewhere, it is a once-off capital grant, applied on a sliding scale according to household income, with the lowest income households receiving the highest subsidy (Behrens and Wilkinson, 2003). The subsidy is used to secure a site, basic services and a 30m² starter house.
In the first decade of post-apartheid delivery, the 1.6 million subsidised starter houses built in new townships were overwhelmingly located on cheap, peripherally located land (Khan and Ambert, 2003, Department of Housing, 2004). This outcome was the result of a number of factors. Firstly, much housing was unquestioningly developed on peripheral land already purchased for township development by the apartheid government in the 1980s (Huchzermeyer, 2003), which unwittingly thwarted the integration objective of post-apartheid policy. Secondly, in order to maximise the size of the starter house achievable, as well as achieve the large quantities of housing called for by the HWP, the National Department of Housing was overly prescriptive with regard to the portion of the housing subsidy that could be used to purchase land. In addition, the Department’s on-site water and sanitation requirements to for example, deal with on-site grey water disposal, implied relatively larger sites (Charlton, 2003). To achieve both these objectives, cheap peripheral land, adjacent to or beyond existing townships, often with inferior physical characteristics, was inevitably targeted for housing development, as better located land was unaffordable by subsidy funds. While in principle, municipalities could supplement subsidy monies to acquire better located land, most were not in a position to do so (Adebayo, 2009). The isolation of such projects was further compounded by a failure to integrate them with the necessary public facilities and amenities, mainly because of the fragmented nature of institutional arrangements for delivery (Todes, 2000, Khan and Ambert, 2003, Gilbert, 2004). The BNG’s review of the subsidy scheme was therefore in part an acknowledgement of the subsidy scheme’s inability to integrate the poor through better located settlements.
4.2The Differing Locational Needs of the Poor in the City
An important limitation to the poor’s integration in the city in the first post-apartheid decade proved to be the insufficient understanding of their locational needs. While post-apartheid housing policy interprets the meaning of good housing location for the poor as being related to its proximity to the Central Business District (CBD), studies conducted in five of South Africa’s largest cities[6] all strongly suggest this to be an oversimplification of a complex issue (Schoonraad, 2000, Todes et al, 2000, Biermann, 2004, Venter et al, 2004). In looking at this issue, Napier (2006) firstly notes that “the ‘poor’ are not all of a piece. There are many and varied household situations in which each has its own aspirations and livelihood strategy.” Accordingly, Royston (2003) argues for theneed to disaggregate the poor into different groupings with different locational requirements, while Charlton (2003) calls for developments that appropriately respond to these requirements. Both Schoonraad and Biermann advance these views by pointing out circumstances under which peripheral locations may very well favour the poor, for example if their plot sizes lend themselves to informal service industry or home-based enterprise activity. At the same time, the locational requirements of low income people with formal employment in the CBD and other formal employment nodes would relate to ease of access to these, whereas people seeking or engaged in unskilled, semi-skilled and domestic occupations might favour locations close to elite suburbs where such opportunities are found.
Many analysts link the lack of integration of the poor in the city to the overwhelmingly peripheral developments (Irurah and Boshoff, 2003, Huchzermeyer, 2003, Napier, 2006 among others). In the first decade of delivery, this ‘one size fits all’ approach disadvantaged those whose livelihood imperatives required alternative locations. Anecdotal evidence of RDP housing recipients who have sold or let their peripherally located properties and moved into inner city and other strategically located informal settlements would seem to confirm this view. Royston however also contends that from a spatial integration perspective, the poor’s lack of integration may have more to do with the spatial separation of housing from economic activities, social facilities and transport networks that characterises RDP developments, than with their peripheral location per se. These differing views reveal an information gap that suggests the need for comprehensive research into the locational needs of the different groups of the poor represented in South African cities.
4.3 Housing Policy Implementation and the Impact of the Market
In the post-apartheid period, market forces have to a large extent maintained the spatial and social economic divide between the rich and the poor first installed through apartheid segregation laws, and yielded a class apartheid that now characterises South African cities (Bond, 2003).
In a bid to attract private investment in the low income housing sector, post-apartheid housing policy embraced market forces, and required that market value be paid for both public and private land, and other housing inputs. In terms of integrating the poor through their access to well-located land, this position constituted an important policy contradiction, that implied that well-located land (interpreted as centrally-located land) could be affordable by the poor (Charlton, 2001, Adebayo, 2008). In any event, as already indicated, the housing subsidy funds could only secure the cheapest land on the market, found on the urban periphery. Importantly also, low income housing competed unfavourably for vacant land because municipalities generally prioritised releasing land for developments that would place them at a competitive advantage over other cities, as well as increase their rate base, for example tourism and spectacle. Todes et al(2000) point out for example, the general reluctance to locate low income housing on the coast, as this was perceived to conflict with tourism. That the poor could themselves benefit from co-location with tourism activities was not taken into account. Thirdly, justified or not, residents of established higher income housing neighbourhoods raised vociferous objections to the siting of low income housing on vacant land in their vicinity, primarily on the grounds of negative impact of such developments on their property values. The time and onerous social processes needed to achieve acceptance of each single such project in the face of such Not In My Back Yard (NIMBY) mentality, coupled with the potential for a reduced rate base made even well-intentioned municipalities shy away from such projects (Khan, 2003b, Todes, 2003).