Cape Town seeks extra R750m for housing

CAPE TOWN — The Mother City needs an extra R750m a year over the next five years to eradicate its housing backlog, mayor Nomaindia Mfeketo said yesterday.

This would help the city meet its target of 20000 houses a year for the next five years and reduce the backlog of 260000 houses, she said at a meeting that included President Thabo Mbeki and Housing Minister Lindiwe Sisulu.

Providing houses at this pace would enable the city to replace 100000 informal structures with appropriate housing by 2014, the deadline set by government to eradicate slums, she said.

Cape Town, which has doubled in size over the last 20 years, faces an influx of about 16000 families a year from rural areas because it is the only metropolitan area within a radius of 700km.

Mfeketo also urged Mbeki to speed up the release of available government land for housing at sites such as the military bases at Youngsfield, Ysterplaat and Wingfield.

Mfeketo was addressing Mbeki and other cabinet ministers, including Sisulu, Environment and Tourism Minister Marthinus van Schalkwyk and Western Cape premier Ebrahim Rasool at a municipal imbizo — part of Mbeki’s nationwide consultation with local government linked to the Project Consolidate service delivery programme.

Project Consolidate, launched last year, supplies technical, administrative and financial expertise to 136 of the country’s 284 municipalities. Eleven years after the end of apartheid, many local authorities have been unable to supply their residents with basic services such as water, power and sanitation.

The ninth and final imbizo in the series was concentrating on Cape Town and specifically Khayelitsha and Mitchells Plain, which make up a third of the city’s population.

It was the first time that all three tiers of government have gathered to discuss the problem areas surrounding service delivery, economic development, transformation, financial viability, good governance and community participation.

Sketching what she called was a serious challenge to the city, Mfeketo also called on the national treasury to lift the city’s budget ceiling from the current R900m to R1,2bn for five years to assist the city to increase its spending on housing relative to the rest of its budget.

Mfeketo said the city received a national housing grant of an average of R325m a year and based on government’s subsidy formula for first time buyers this would build an average 7750 units a year. This amount only catered for 48% of the new inflow of home seekers into the province and would “not even begin to impact on the existing backlog”.

Mfeketo also said there was a need to identify settlement opportunities along the west coast and to the north of Cape Town.

Summing up the deliberations Mbeki said anything government did would succeed or fail depending on what was achieved at local government level.

He said the imbizo had agreed that the metro council, provincial and national government would meet early next year to assess what needed to be done to speed up developments in housing, service delivery, job creation and crime. - Business Day - News Worth Knowing