The shape of policy and the capacity of government to respond to the housing challenge
All of this leads to the next category of articles, which seem to be questioning whether “Breaking New Ground” is indeed breaking NEW ground or perpetuating old approaches and styles. Two years into the adoption of the strategy (which has never been formally published), analysts both inside and outside of government are asking if it is working.
A recent discussion document on macro-social trends released by the Presidency, entitled “A Nation in the Making”, raises the question of what kind of nation we want to be. The report highlights changes in SA’s household structure.
Summarised in the Business Day, the report notes that:
“From 1996 to 2001, the number of households rose by 30% whilte the population expanded only 11%. So the number of residents in the average household fell from 4.5 to 3.9. Poor households are still a lot larger, on average, than richer ones (six people make up the poorest households on average, while among the non-poor, household size was 2.9). And black South Africans are much more likely to live in households of more than four people and fewer than four rooms than are white South Africans.”
The Business Day journalist Hilary Joffe argues that the national policy to ‘eradicate informal settlements’ is unrealistic given these changing demographics. She argues that “the expansion of informal settlements reflects household and migration patterns, and helps to solve the problems that those patterns create.” In an op-ed piece also in the Business Day, Glen Mills argues that housing implementation, notwithstanding Breaking New Ground, falls short on urban form, integration, sustainability, technology and user involvement because it fails to involve the dwellers in the design and creation of their housing.
A ‘social compact’ approach was included in the original 1994 housing white paper, but abandoned a few years later as provincial governments struggled to deal with the intensity of public participation. In some areas, NGOs such as the Development Action Group in
The Gauteng Housing MEC (provincial minister) Nomvula Mokonyane has been promoting an inclusionary housing policy, which might respond in part to some of the problems that Mills raises. Writing in the Business Day, her emphasis is on the inclusion of households just outside the subsidy eligibility range (earning R3500 – R7000 per month), who cannot find housing that is affordable to them, given rising property prices. This is encouraging – she is the first provincial politician to explicitly highlight this segment of the population for policy intervention.
Meanwhile, the press is also reporting that subsidy fraud is under scrutiny. A report on irregular allocations of housing sbusidies by the Auditor General estimates that about R323 million was paid irrecuglarly to 53 426 people between 1995 and 2004. This created a rather tense meeting for the Housing Director General and his deputy at Parliament’s standing committee in June, where members expressed grave concern not only with the reported fraud but also the national department’s reaction to it. The Mail and Guardian reported Committee chairperson Themba Godi as saying “we did not get a sense that you are with us in terms of concern” and “It was really a serious challenge to sit and list to responses that did not show a sense of full appreciation of the problems.” When the national housing DG suggested that provinces should account for themselves, committee members were indignant: “you are the overall accounting officer” said one member to the housing DG. Another said “what worries me is that this is the main function of your department… and you cannot even get that right…”
The Housing DG has only been in office for less than three months… he certainly has his work cut out for him.
Tomorrow: new housing finance initiatives and delivery stumbling blocks.
