HOUSING Minister Lindiwe Sisulu is beginning to echo some of her predecessors under National Party rule. Like them, she threatens to get rid of informal settlements. Like them, she will fail.
Sisulu recently seized the opportunity created by xenophobic violence to demand an extra R12bn from the treasury so that she can double the pace of state housing provision from its present level of about 250,000 units a year.
Even if she gets this money, the state is unlikely to be able to spend it on housing given the numerous deficiencies plaguing government at every level. The result will be more informal settlements. They have already mushroomed.
Recent figures from Statistics SA show that the number of households living in informal dwellings has risen in the past decade from 1,5-million to 1,8-million.
Yet Sisulu talks of “eradicating informality”. “At the moment ‘it’s a free for all’, (anybody can) put up a shack,” she said recently. Laws barring individuals from setting up informal dwellings therefore needed to be enforced, she said.
It’s been tried before, nowhere with more ruthlessness than in Western Cape, where Africans were subject to a double disability. In addition to being subject to the pass laws, aimed to minimise the number of Africans in all the cities, Western Cape Africans could not receive jobs if coloured labour was available.
Testimonies to the failure of the forced urban removal policy are the vast informal settlements on the Cape Flats for the past 30 years or more and the fact that in 1986 PW Botha’s government repealed the pass laws on the grounds that they were unenforceable.
Yet if you have an asset and no job, it makes sense to use that asset to earn income even if you then have to buy or erect a dwelling in an informal settlement. That there are markets in state-provided housing and — it would appear — also in informal housing is a good thing.
The government may feel informal settlements are a blot on the landscape. While they should not be romanticised — among other things they are prone to uncontrollable, often lethal, fires — they are a form of affordable housing for the poor.
To ensure that those who receive these houses will then remain in them and not sell or let them will require bureaucratic control and policing eerily reminiscent of the apartheid past.
Not only that, it will also be tantamount to criminalising the efforts of poor people to escape poverty. It will create a new form of inequality in the enjoyment of property rights between better-off people who can exploit property ownership to generate income and the poor, forbidden by law to do so.
It also risks creating a new source of violence, this time directed at the state. - M&G
Sisulu recently seized the opportunity created by xenophobic violence to demand an extra R12bn from the treasury so that she can double the pace of state housing provision from its present level of about 250,000 units a year.
Even if she gets this money, the state is unlikely to be able to spend it on housing given the numerous deficiencies plaguing government at every level. The result will be more informal settlements. They have already mushroomed.
Recent figures from Statistics SA show that the number of households living in informal dwellings has risen in the past decade from 1,5-million to 1,8-million.
Yet Sisulu talks of “eradicating informality”. “At the moment ‘it’s a free for all’, (anybody can) put up a shack,” she said recently. Laws barring individuals from setting up informal dwellings therefore needed to be enforced, she said.
It’s been tried before, nowhere with more ruthlessness than in Western Cape, where Africans were subject to a double disability. In addition to being subject to the pass laws, aimed to minimise the number of Africans in all the cities, Western Cape Africans could not receive jobs if coloured labour was available.
To chase Africans out of Cape Town’s informal settlements the previous government routinely bulldozed their homes, loaded them on to buses, and shipped them off to the Transkei. Despite the terror, large numbers thus deported soon found their way back to Cape Town. Whatever the risks and legal handicaps there, it was a better place to live than the Transkei.
Testimonies to the failure of the forced urban removal policy are the vast informal settlements on the Cape Flats for the past 30 years or more and the fact that in 1986 PW Botha’s government repealed the pass laws on the grounds that they were unenforceable.
"on the grounds that they were unenforceable"Apart from “eradicating informality”, Sisulu intends to act against some occupants of state-built formal houses. Owners who have sold such houses before the prescribed period has elapsed are guilty of a “criminal offence”, she says. This is a harsh way to describe economically rational behaviour that is not inherently criminal. Sisulu also objects to the renting out of such houses.
Yet if you have an asset and no job, it makes sense to use that asset to earn income even if you then have to buy or erect a dwelling in an informal settlement. That there are markets in state-provided housing and — it would appear — also in informal housing is a good thing.
The minister, though, is talking of laying charges against owners who have sold their houses, forcing them to reverse the sales, evict new tenants or owners, and compelling the original owners to move back in.
A housing policy which necessitates such coercion is bound to fail.
The government may feel informal settlements are a blot on the landscape. While they should not be romanticised — among other things they are prone to uncontrollable, often lethal, fires — they are a form of affordable housing for the poor.
Leaving aside fraud and bribery, the 2-million houses Sisulu talks of building in the next four years will go to the poorest of the poor. With unemployment at 40%, most of the newly housed will be jobless.
To ensure that those who receive these houses will then remain in them and not sell or let them will require bureaucratic control and policing eerily reminiscent of the apartheid past.
Not only that, it will also be tantamount to criminalising the efforts of poor people to escape poverty. It will create a new form of inequality in the enjoyment of property rights between better-off people who can exploit property ownership to generate income and the poor, forbidden by law to do so.
It also risks creating a new source of violence, this time directed at the state. - M&G
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