Elizabeth Toll has a million-dollar view.
But as the sun dips behind the mountains enclosing the picturesque cove where she lives, she shivers inside her tiny wooden shack, the raging wind whistling through her corrugated iron roof.
Above, more shacks balance precariously against the mountain, just a stone’s throw from a popular tourist spot outside Cape Town.
The 49-year-old has lived on this prime patch of land for 15 years, fought a legal battle to avoid eviction, and is still ”waiting, waiting, waiting” for a house from government.
”I applied many years ago, but nothing has happened. I haven’t given up hope,” she says, coughing with a cold as she clutches a small worn slip with a reference number and a housing department stamp.
Toll is one of millions of South Africans still living in shacks. Even as the government has built millions of homes since apartheid ended, the informal settlements keep growing, turning housing into one of the key issues in general elections on Wednesday.
Under the Group Areas Act, black South Africans were forced to live on the edge of cities, where overcrowded and poor townships grew.
Kailash Bhana, chief executive of the Development Action Group (DAG), a housing advocacy group, says that while the government has built an impressive 2,8-million houses in 15 years, the situation is still dire.
”Overall the South African government has performed in terms of numbers. No one can deny that given the backlog that they started off with. It is the quality of the housing and the access to services that is being questioned.”
Critics argue that the government’s housing scheme has reinforced apartheid-era urban planning, keeping the poor on cheap land in inferior houses far from urban employment, schools, healthcare and other services.
Moegsien Hendricks, the group’s programme manager, warned South Africa could end up with giant slums such as those in India and Latin America.
”All the evidence is there to suggest we are on our way to having mega slums,” he said.
Itumeleng Kotsoane, director general of the housing department, said only 1,1-million South African families now live in shacks, but DAG figures show the backlog growing at 200 000 households a year.
Kotsoane admits that the government’s initial drive to build a million houses in only five years resulted in shoddy workmanship and poor planning.
”Before we were looking at numbers, now we are looking at housing opportunities,” he said, saying policy had shifted to creating better neighbourhoods and discouraging urban sprawl.
Rising property prices are one of the main challenges, forcing even teachers and nurses to live in informal settlements as they cannot afford to rent close to the city.
”Unless the state intervenes in the land and property market it is never going to meet the backlog,” said Hendricks.
A small community 40km outside of Cape Town in the vast dusty expanse called Mitchells Plain are living in houses painted in red, pink, yellow, and blue after 17 years on housing waiting lists.
But the numbers of people milling around in the heat of the day show the high level of unemployment, with many unable to afford the R15 taxi fare into the city to search for work.
Expletives mark the walls of the new community centre, theft is rife and single mothers with up to seven small children live on their own with no income.
”The South African housing scheme is unsustainable outside a broader economic strategy. People live beyond housing,” said Aaron Hobongwana, a development specialist.
”Even if people don’t have permanent jobs, if they lived in the CBD they could wash someone’s car … It’s a vicious cycle.” – AFP
