The need for houses...

The City of Cape Town's "biggest crisis" is its housing shortage, with 300,000 units needed to meet the full demand for formal housing.

And this demand is increasing by 16,000 units every year.

The housing backlog was highlighted as one of the city's challenges in its 2007/08 annual report, to be tabled in council on Wednesday.

According to the report, there were 28,000 shacks in Cape Town in 1994. By 2006, this figure had spiralled to 105,000 shacks, with "tens of thousands" of people living in backyard informal structures.

At least 48,000 existing structures must be moved to new sites this year to avoid the high risks of floods, fire and the spread of disease, the city said.

But the city's new housing plan has in the past year created more than 6,400 housing opportunities, of which more than 3,000 were subsidy houses.

Although below the original target of 10,200 houses, it was above the revised June 2008 target of 6,000 housing opportunities.

The upgrade of the city's informal settlements will ensure that they are given full essential services while formal housing programmes are put in place.

In the 2007/08 financial year, 60 informal settlements were serviced with water, sanitation and area lighting.

The report noted that housing delivery was achieved despite challenges such as environmental impact assessment processes, problems with construction industry capacity, the shortage of professional managers and community interventions that stopped or slowed developments.

Projects in Phoenix, Manenberg and Khayelitsha were each delayed for five months because of interference from the community, the report noted.

The city needs stronger political support for its housing projects, improved communication with councillors and community leaders and agreement on the allocation of products before projects start.

Land invasions remain a challenge for the city and the council has allocated R8-million to set up a dedicated anti-land invasion unit.

New environmental regulations meant that several previous development approvals needed to be restarted.

The report said the city has been slow in reacting to tenders, meaning that some tenders had had to be repeated and others had become unsustainable because of cash flow problems.

Although the provincial government had yet to give the city the full housing accreditation it needs to streamline and accelerate housing delivery, it did afford the city conditional level one accreditation, which allows it to administer housing projects.

- Cape Times