In Ekurhuleni, Sibongile* supports three young children while clutching at a safety net of informally occupied land. After losing her employment as a domestic worker and the accommodation that came with it, she needed to keep a foothold in the city. Like most people in the Somalia informal settlement she is acutely aware of how tenuous her claim to the land is, but says: “It’s life, I borrowed it.”
Thandiswa* and her partner informally purchased an RDP house, which enabled them to move their children to a different school. For men like Tshepo* the ability to find a new job is directly related to living close to employment opportunities.
Despite the long-standing recognition of the importance of addressing the racial segregation of South Africa’s apartheid-designed cities, there has been little political enthusiasm for developing policy that addresses the markets that are considered to allocate the different uses of urban land most productively and efficiently. Notwithstanding recent refinements to national housing policy, government officials remain hamstrung by having to resort to housing interventions to address land issues.
The creativity and the diverse social identities people create through transactions are in stark contrast to the relative bluntness of interventions framed in terms of national housing policy. Frustration among local government officials abounds and poor people continue to find their own “extra-legal” solutions which, research findings suggest, provide short-term relief from homelessness, but ultimately fail to provide the necessary tenure security to generate wealth.
But what would a policy that progressively addresses urban land markets have to take into account to ensure that this market works for people like Tshepo and Thandiswa? Recent research findings published by the Urban LandMark programme in Pretoria offer a first glimpse into this complex area of life so neglected by policymakers.
First, it must be based on the recognition that there are informal land markets operating in poorer parts of the cities. The effectiveness, simplicity and efficiency of these markets tend to rely on the networks of social relations people are able to establish and maintain before price is factored into the transactions.
Research shows that in informal settlements between 15% and 38% of houses changes hands every five years. These rates of transacting are comparable in dynamism to those in growing formal property markets.
Far from being some costless, chaotic, un-modern response, informal transactions display a high sense of order and are carefully calculated and executed, usually based on more complex calculations than simple profit.
Second, research suggests that, contrary to the common view, government officials are very much part of creating and sustaining informal land markets — often on the basis of humanitarian municipal responses to the harsh realities of urban poverty. For example, for someone like Tshepo, the value of land in an informal settlement is that the municipality has registered the shack and calculated service needs, thereby attaching and indicating his “future right to development”.
Third, it will have to take into account that informal land markets are an integral part of broader urban land markets, even if the linkages between them are unequal and uneven. Relatively cheaper and quicker informal transactions allow poor people to realise their right to access the city: an issue that was at the heart of the struggle against apartheid and that now continues to characterise the urban residential land market.
If the state considers the very real challenge of addressing the needs of people living in informal settlements, it needs to understand first how these markets work at settlement level. For this to happen, the state must consider how to release serviced land at a rapid rate, but not lock households into one location.
This implies granting access to land in many places, improving the ability of people to hold on to that land legally, but stimulating the land market so that people can move when they need to.
Colin Marx is lead researcher on the Urban LandMark study for Isandla Institute and Mark Napier is the programme director, Urban LandMark
* Not their real names
A place to call home
For Maria Lesego (44) her three-roomed shack in Tokyo Sexwale, on the East Rand, is the home she always wanted, even though it is built of corrugated iron, has no electricity and the nearest tap is 1km away. “This is my place. I’m safer here because if your employers don’t want you anymore, they can kick you out at any given time,” says the former domestic worker. “Whether it’s midnight or not, you’ll have to make a plan, but no one can kick you out here.”
Yet Lesego does have not the formal title deed to her home: she received the land free, after applying to the local municipal housing committee.
She plans to pass her shack on to her children when she dies, but the only document she has that indicates any kind of ownership is a letter from the provincial housing department promising “further development”.
“My right is that I got forms which assigned this place to me,” she says. “So this is my place and I have rights to it. People identify this as my place. They know that Maria lives in this shack.
“We went to the [ward] committee and told them we needed a place to stay. Eventually they gave me this stand, which we cleaned up. We built our shack and then lived here,” she says. Yet she longs for “proper development” as she calls it.
“This is not a proper stand, it’s just a passage,” she says, adding that if she ever gets a brick and mortar RDP house she plans to grow a garden full of beautiful plants and trees.
Lesego’s sense of her security of tenure is just one of the stories that researchers from the Centre for Urban and Built Environment Studies (Cubes) at the University of the Witwatersrand examined to determine the social and economic impact of holding title to land.
The study shows that providing land title to low-income households leads to definite social improvements, such as providing an urban base for extended family networks and making households more visible to government, allowing them to access social benefits, such as grants.
It does not, however, necessarily lead to economic improvement, such as money saving, accessing loans or upgrading property. The researchers says a title deed has little effect on access to credit. Only about 14% of low-income households borrow money at all, as they fear debt.
Researchers Colin Marx and Margot Rubin says they were surprised by how many social benefits accrue to poor households as a result of land tenure.
A key finding of the report is that whether a person has a formal title deed has little effect on the house “owner’s” perception of his or her security of tenure, as in the case of Lesego.
The study shows the various ways in which poor people define their ownership of urban land, such as possessing “happy letters” — letters signed by a household expressing their satisfaction with a RDP house — or a letter from the housing department promising further development, known as a B-Form or a C-Form.
“What the study brought out was that government should begin to legitimate the different unofficial forms of tenure that are recognised within low-income communities, but which are not formal title deeds,” says Rubin.
Regardless of whether they live in formal or informal households, 95% of respondents believe they cannot be moved from their homes, the study shows.
Ninety-five percent of respondents say they will not sell their homes, indicating that people do not see their houses as an investment from which they might generate a profit.
“They rather see their homes as an urban base for the extended family network,” the two researchers say. “The extended family has ‘use rights’ and can be accommodated in the unit, although they cannot own it.” — Yolandi Groenewald