Providing housing was a race against time and a fight for resources, Housing Minister Lindiwe Sisulu said on Monday.
The minister was speaking during a helicopter trip over various Gauteng housing projects accompanied by the Angolan Minister of Housing, Sita Jose.
”The level of poverty in South Africa is still very high,” she said.
”The previous government under apartheid stopped building houses for blacks in the 1960s. It’s really a race against time and a fight for resources to ensure that our people are receiving housing.”
The minister told her Angolan counterpart of the challenges facing her department, including protests at perceived lack of housing delivery.
The Gauteng landscape from the air — with tarred roads across its length and breadth, some bustling with traffic, some desolate — provided a birds-eye view of the department’s ambitious plan to house the people of the province.
The projects included the Thornton View Housing project, a mixed development providing 8 557 subsidised houses, 3 252 credit-linked houses and 3 261 bonded homes; the Pennyville Project, also a mixed development earmarked to house those living in the Zamimpilo informal settlement near Riverlea; and the 200-hectare Chief Mogale Sustainable Integrated Development.
Construction was well under way at most of the sites. However, the province’s many informal settlements remained an eyesore.
The department’s ”Breaking New Ground”, 2004 housing plan aimed to address this with integrated communities from all economic and social spheres, uniting them in ”sustainable human settlements”, complete with schools, clinics, shopping malls and parks.
Sisulu said government, however, also faced the ”ever-increasing” problem of people flocking to larger cities in search of job opportunities and economic advancement.
This was a ”natural thing”, she added, but it strained the housing department’s ability to respond to the demand for housing. Rural development, one of the ANC’s priorities in its upcoming term, would work toward addressing this challenge, she said.
Gauteng housing department head, Benedicta Monama, said she expected her department to take a hit as a result of the global financial crisis, preventing it from rolling out as many houses as it had planned.
”If the budget is larger, we can deliver more houses … but with the economy slowing down budgets will shrink,” she said.
”That is also how it impacts inflation in building material costs,” she said.
Jose, who was in the country to learn from South Africa’s experience with providing housing on a large scale and at a rapid pace, said the idea of integrated communities and mixed developments appealed to him and would be one he would like to import to his own country.
”It is good for upliftment … the integrated system does not only focus on housing but on schools, clinics,” he said, via a translator.
His government was tasked with the monumental task of building one million houses. Angola had been offered $500-million by the Development Bank of China to assist it in funding the project.
Monama said that while Gauteng had rolled out 68 000 houses in 2008, through various projects and many through public and private sector partnerships, the demand continued to grow.
The provincial housing department had compiled a demand database asking people already on housing waiting lists to re-register and also calling for new applicants.
The database was intended to improve the process of allocating houses on their completion and also to help plan further projects.
Monama said that the backlog remained ”quite high”. – Sapa