The City of Cape Town has announced housing development that is ‘moving towards inclusion’ – but inclusion for whom? Photo: File
Sometime during July, I was scrolling through a property site, perusing accommodation options while trying to plan my future. I found a flat — two bedroom, bathroom, 115m² in Cape Town. “That could work,” I think — until I see the price. R35 000 a month.
I scroll further. Nothing under R19 000.
I know I’m not the only Western Cape local who has had that gut-punch moment while trying to find a place to live. So, when the province’s infrastructure MEC Tertuis Simmers announced on 25 July that new “affordable” and “social” housing development plans would soon be made available in Cape Town’s inner city, I was intrigued. Sceptical, yes, but curious to hear the full story.
But after reading Simmers’ letter to GroundUp, in which he outlines the development plans and frames them as a “move towards inclusion”, I was left with more questions than answers. The biggest one — inclusion for whom?
The new developments — including the Leeuloop Precinct, the Founders Garden and the Prestwich Precinct — promise about 1 766 social housing units, 120 affordable housing units, and a total of 1 892 residential units. But these homes won’t be offered on a first come, first served basis. Access depends on eligibility, which raises key questions about who qualifies and which income brackets will be prioritised.
Simmers frames these developments as part of a broader effort to “redress past spatial injustices”. But they also arrive in the shadow of the protracted Tafelberg court case of 2019, where both the Western Cape Government and the City of Cape Town were taken to court by housing activists for failing to deliver any social housing in central Cape Town for more than 25 years.
The case centred on the province’s 2015 decision to sell the Tafelberg property in Sea Point — one of the last well-located pieces of public land on the Atlantic Seaboard — to a private school, rather than using it for affordable housing. Activists argued that the sale entrenched apartheid-era spatial exclusion and that the city had also failed to use its powers to make inner-city land available for lower-income residents.
Although the initial high court ruling was overturned by the supreme court of appeal on technical grounds, the case highlighted a long-standing failure by both spheres of government to meet their constitutional housing obligations in high-value urban areas. Whether these new projects are driven by genuine commitment or reputational damage control is anyone’s guess — but the timing is telling.
In his letter, Simmers draws a distinction between social housing and what used to be called RDP (Reconstruction and Development Programme) housing (now Breaking New Ground or BNG). Social housing refers to state-subsidised rental units for households earning R1 850 to R22 000 a month, regulated under the Social Housing Act and managed by accredited institutions. These units are exclusively to be rented and cannot be sold.
In contrast, affordable housing, as defined by the Western Cape government, targets households earning R3 500 to R30 000 a month. This can include both rental and ownership options, often supported through indirect subsidies like cross-subsidisation (where market-rate units fund affordable ones) or discounted public land. Unlike social housing, affordable housing does not require oversight by the Social Housing Regulatory Authority, provided there are mechanisms in place to ensure affordability over time.
To fund all of this, the Western Cape government is pioneering alternative and blended finance approaches — combining public grants, private investment and land value strategies. One such strategy involves selling high-end units to subsidise affordable ones, as seen in Leeuloop and Founders Garden. This cross-subsidisation model is clever, but it carries risks, especially when “public good” is tied to private market success.
Who gets included?
So, what exactly counts as “affordable”? The income bracket defined — R3 500 to R30 000 a month (with “primary targeting” of R3 500 to R27 200) — is both broad and politically charged.
At the lower end are precariously employed workers, informal traders and grant-reliant households. For them, “affordable” can only mean deep subsidies and permanent rent caps — the kind Simmers promises will be delivered. At the upper end are upwardly mobile professionals earning R25 000 or more, many of whom already have access to credit and housing finance. Yet they too fall under the “affordable” banner, allowing developers to meet policy thresholds while catering to a far less precarious demographic.
This raises some hard questions — will developments cater more to the R25 000+ income band than the R3 500 one? Will rent controls or purchase subsidies reflect this disparity or flatten it? And if they flatten it, who benefits most from this?
By flattening such a wide spectrum into a single category, the policy risks hiding the very inequalities it claims to address. Developers can technically “tick the box” for affordability while still targeting higher-income tenants who pose less financial risk.
This matters. In the US, affordability mechanisms such as Low-Income Housing Tax Credit often lapse after 15 years, creating cycles of displacement. In Canada, public backlash against weakened affordability targets has grown as working-class renters are pushed further out.
Back home, Johannesburg’s inclusionary zoning policy — while progressive on paper — has struggled with developer resistance, legal ambiguity and implementation delays, worsened by the Covid-19 backlog. And others have argued, as I have, that the “affordability” model often favours the upwardly mobile, not the working poor. Even Stellenbosch, which recently announced its own inclusionary zoning efforts, offers no guarantees.
To avoid repeating these failures, Cape Town’s inclusionary housing policy needs more than ambition, it needs enforceable protections. At minimum, the city ??? must:
- Mandate permanent affordability clauses in all publicly subsidized housing contracts;
- Ringfence units for lower-income households (for example, R3 500 to R7 500 a month), with clear rent ceilings and oversight; and
- Publicly disclose allocations and affordability terms, to ensure transparency and accountability.
Without these safeguards, affordability risks becoming a short-lived marketing tool, especially when it depends on market-rate units to cross-subsidise the rest. Proximity to wealth tends to redefine affordability over time, reshaping who belongs in a neighbourhood and who gets priced out.
What inclusion should look like
What bothered me most about Simmers’ letter was both his opening — which I’ve referenced in this piece — and his end. I start with his opening in full: “These projects are not just about building homes, they are about redressing spatial injustice, unlocking economic potential, and creating inclusive, dignified communities in the heart of Cape Town.”
It’s a powerful promise. And, to be clear, these projects aren’t nothing. They mark a step up from elite-only development and signal an overdue acknowledgement of spatial exclusion. But it also risks becoming a symbolic gesture if we don’t ask what meaningful inclusion actually looks like, beyond performance metrics and market-friendly strategies.
Inclusionary housing is a promising start, but it cannot be the end goal of urban housing policy.
A truly “inclusive” housing policy would admit that the crisis isn’t just about housing shortages. It’s about land ownership, racialised inequality, labour precarity and historical exclusion. If inclusion is the goal, then it must be systemic, not symbolic. We need more than mixed-income buildings. We need a city that treats housing not as an asset class, but as a right.
True inclusion means long-term affordability that doesn’t depend on market success. While Simmers emphasised rental caps, what happens 10 or 20 years from now when land speculation returns? Who gets to stay then?
We need models that prioritise stability over profit: community land trusts, cooperative housing and public land reserved for non-profit development. And we need those models to be protected from financialisation and resale.
A few “affordable” units scattered among luxury towers won’t undo a century of exclusion. Inclusion must mean redistributing access to land, to services and to opportunity. That means building deep affordability in central areas, not just moderate affordability for professionals priced out of the suburbs.
Simmers ends his letter by saying: “Social and affordable housing in the inner city is no longer a dream …” and I wonder whether he realises what’s actually keeping that dream out of reach — and for whom.
The truth is, we can debate “inclusion” until our faces turn blue. But unless we challenge the structural drivers of exclusion — runaway private rentals, the spread of Airbnb, the encroachment of “digital nomad urbanism” — the dream of inner-city housing will remain just that: a dream.
Even the most well-intentioned affordable housing projects will be drowned out by speculative forces unless they’re accompanied by serious rental control, strong protections against commodification and a commitment to housing as a public good. To make this vision real, the city must legislate deep affordability, enforce it and ensure that inclusion means lasting access — not just temporary proximity.
Nicola van der Westhuizen is a PhD candidate in social anthropology in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Stellenbosch University.