The houses built for 680 000 families are the most tangible signs of change, writes Ferial Haffajee
If there is one thing that has marked the landscape of delivery, it’s the HOP-huise. That’s the Afrikaans term for the houses built under the auspices of the Reconstruction and Development Programme (in Afrikaans, that’s the Heropbou en Ontwikkelingsprogram or the HOP).
In most towns and in every city, rows of uniform houses have sprung up. Some are little more than match-boxes erected by apartheid’s planners, others are bigger and prettier and resemble the beginnings of a home.
Delivery doesn’t come in more tangible a form than brick and mortar. It is a first asset, and with a home in hand most people become consumers of goods like fridges, stoves and the furniture that keep downstream industries alive and buoy the economy.
Since 1994, the government has poured R10- billion into a housing programme that formed the pinnacle of its election promise. One million housing subsidies in five years – the promise rang from pre-election platforms and the African National Congress’s posters. It was a pledge that came back to haunt them.
In the ANC’s first year in office, only 6 800 subsidies were approved, against a goal of 50 000. In the second year, only 30 000 were approved, against a goal of 150 000. And in its third year in office, the dream of one million houses slipped even further out of the government’s grasp.
Last year the Mail & Guardian asked: “Whatever happened to the dream of low-cost housing?” By then, not even 200 000 houses had been built to house a complement of homeless people growing by 200 000 a year.
This year Minister of Housing Sankie Mthembi- Mahanyele has come back with the riposte that black women can build. It’s a claim with which most in the industry agree.
Earlier this year she revealed that three million people have been housed – more than 959 000 government subsidies have been paid out, providing a fillip to the construction industry. More than 680 000 houses have been or are being built. About half the contracts have gone to black contractors, which has served the further function of ballooning the black middle class.
Mthembi-Mahanyele and her Director General, Mphumi Nxumalo-Nhlapo, now preside over a happier chapter in housing, and while they still bicker with each other, most sectors of the industry agree that the major hurdles have been cleared.
Creative financing mechanisms have been found, banks are coming into the loop and an old-fashioned statist approach to housing is being ditched in favour of a mixed housing policy.
With her predecessor, Joe Slovo, Mthembi- Mahanyele is credited with synchronising 17 unequal and racist administrations into one authority. Chaos in housing was a particular apartheid legacy. Grafted on to that were nine brand-new provincial authorities filled with inexperienced (and often starry-eyed) civil servants.
“The capacity of the provinces had to be built from scratch,” says Brian Moholo of the Urban Sector Network. “The political will was there, but the bureaucracy was difficult.”
In 1996 a task team cut down the number of steps between the time a subsidy was approved and a contractor started building from 203 to 183. There’s still a lot of red tape, but the minister claims “the capacity that was not available on day one in 1994 has now been built up”. That’s been achieved by link-ups with universities that have trained civil servants from the provinces and local authorities.
Mthembi-Mahanyele seems set to maintain the Cabinet position she’s grown into, despite the Motheo housing scandal of two years ago in which a R175-million contract was granted to an inexperienced company whose director was friends with the minister.
In the next term, the ministry and the department will begin to refine housing financing.
One of the reasons behind slow delivery was that the record of understanding with the banks collapsed. From the first year of its signing, banks did not make their target lending figures. Only 14% of houses built in the past five years have been funded by banks; the majority have been built on the government subsidy alone.
The subsidy is meant to cater only for the poorest of the poor. A lending gap has been created for people who are slightly wealthier. It’s now being filled by different forms of funding, like securitisation and by micro-lenders.
In addition, the ministry will seek to pass a home loan mortgage Act in the next session of Parliament which attempts to improve mortgage lending. “We’re not asking banks to lend badly, but to be fair in accessing credit to people,” says Mthembi-Mahanyele.
The carrot is being replaced by the stick to stave off a housing crisis. The housing backlog is now between 2,6-million and three million houses.
The building industry is not happy with legislation compelling its members to register with the National Home Builders Registration Council. The government counters that there are enough shoddy houses for the council to enforce quality control.
At the Victoria Mxenge housing savings scheme in Cape Town, no council is needed for quality control. This award-winning scheme is at the cutting edge of the People’s Housing Process. The term may sound highfalutin, but the recipe is simple: poor people save money communally to build their own homes. The Victoria Mxenge project began with 11 women who saved 50c a day. The process at first got short shrift from the government, where the policy was state-led housing. Launched as a departmental project in May 1996, it received a tiny budget. But as news of successful projects grew, it became clear that while the government could provide, ordinary people could provide better.
The homes being built by communities were often bigger and of a better quality than many of the private sector’s HOP-huise. In Kanana – translated as Canaan – near Sebokeng, the housing project has mushroomed. The savings scheme has built its own offices. Their records are painstakingly written out by hand in a school exercise book and funds are carefully controlled down to the last R2,69.
The scheme provides employment, creates a sense of caring because the community builds first for those who need it most, and subsidy savings are used to put in infrastructure like sewerage systems.
It is one of 24 projects supported by the government in the past three years which have seen the ANC’s original housing policy turned on its head.
“Where people are building on their own, a certain transformation is injected into a community. You inject a spirit of co- operation. If someone doesn’t pay for three months, the community will want to find out why,” says Mthembi-Mahanyele. “We have a window into the lives of communities.”
To build quickly and in large quantities, communities which want to construct their own houses need help to quickly access their subsidies and be trained in basic building skills. Their homes can be used as collateral to project them into the marketplace. Access to credit brings opportunity, be it hawking, a small business or even a small construction company.
One criticism of the government’s mass housing project is that it has failed to transform the urban landscape. Most of the 600 000 houses have sprung up cheek by jowl with existing townships. Attempts to build mixed residential estates (where maids and madams live nearer to each other) have met with near insurrection.
Consequently, apartheid planning lives on into the next millennium in much of South Africa.