JAMES WILSON: Home truth

The past 18 months have brought into sharper focus the many challenges we face as a nation, and raised questions as to how to best address them. What has clearly emerged is that government — be it at municipal, provincial or national level — cannot adequately, sustainably and consistently fulfil its obligations to the citizenry.

Visions of a better, inclusive future need to be elevated beyond sound bites and require an expertise that government, frankly, has demonstrated it cannot deliver. The role of public-private partnerships and their significance in speeding up bureaucratic processes has also become more prominent as the coronavirus pandemic highlighted the need for agile, flexible, and timely solutions.

These ideals must be underpinned by solutions that help build and rebuild communities so the loose threads of our riven social fabric can be woven back together. Fundamental to many of these ideals is the ability to provide adequate housing to the millions of South Africans who still live in shacks or, due to apartheid spatial planning, live far from work and for whom access to public services like schools and hospitals continue to be a daily challenge.

The pandemic has also shown up the fragility of the middle class, driven by mass job losses and the inability to service their debt. Government policy needs to do better at future-proofing our communities; to build sustainable models that will help us grow and prosper and be able to better weather future storms.

Housing continues to be a millstone for various levels of government administration. Time and again they have fallen short of addressing and redressing past imbalances in this sector — through corruption at the highest level and sheer incompetence in delivering substandard homes.

In short, government has been shown to be ineffective in delivering affordable housing at the scale, quality and expertise required. It needs help, and fast. SA has a housing crisis and some of the numbers make for grim reading: since 1994 government has delivered about 100,000-120,000 subsidised homes a year — not nearly enough as there is still a 2-million unit housing shortfall, which means at least 12-million citizens are without adequate housing.

The pandemic’s economic toll will leave many more people concerned about having a roof over their heads. It is government’s duty and responsibility to deliver subsidised homes for households earning R3,500 per month or less, but it has so far failed even to resolve the housing backlog.

The problem has been worsened by rapid urbanisation and 1.5% annual population growth. If we are to seriously tackle SA’s housing crisis we need a more pragmatic approach, one that trusts in the skill, knowledge and expertise of industry professionals with a history of delivering property projects.

As a developer that caters to various segments of the market, we call on government to be more flexible about densification, rezoning and speeding up approval for new developments; reconsider the use and purpose of land it owns in CBDs; and partner with the industry in championing sustainable and affordable homes.

Government’s role is fundamental to all of this; it is solely responsible for supplying subsidised housing and must be encouraged to continue to do so. However, the numbers and lack of quality point to myriad failures and these must be arrested for real progress and change.

The state has to call in the experts — property development and construction companies with proven records of delivering high-quality subsidised homes to deadline and within allocated budgets. Subsidised homes built previously have been poorly constructed, to put it mildly, and there should be no excuse for this if we are serious about collectively building SA and its human capital.

As mentioned earlier, the pandemic has created a crisis for the middle classes here and across the world,  bringing the idea of affordable housing into sharper focus. Affordable housing differs from subsidised housing  as it is aimed at households with incomes of up to R20,000 a month. It is generally (and internationally) accepted that this section of the population can afford to dedicate a maximum of 30% of their pay to accommodation.

Again, it is important to note that it would be impossible for private developers to provide high-quality, affordable housing to this section of the population without government as a partner. Ideally, affordable housing should be situated in established suburbs and CBDs, close to existing infrastructure and amenities.

Not only do these developments have the potential to redress some of the inequalities of the past, they also have the power to build forward-looking communities, underpinned by quality accommodation in areas where they can build a more stable life and help fulfil the potential we know we have.   

• Wilson is CEO of The Amdec Group.