AFFORDABLE HOUSING
AND URBAN DESIGN
Addressing SA’s Missing
Middle Housing Problem
By Gary White, Bouwer Serfontein, Simone Swanepoel & Dalena Beyers - NEW URBAN
H
ousing has been a hot topic in South Africa for
quite some time now. Removing people from
certain areas and allocating land to place new
housing will always be contentious, but another
issue that escapes the headlines is the housing
shortage for the ‘Missing Middle’.
But what is the ‘Missing Middle’ and how can
something have a shortage if it is missing?
In 2010 the Charter of the New Urbanism in collaboration with
Daniel Parolek coined the phrase “Missing Middle Housing”.
The “Missing Middle Housing” is a range of multi-unit or cluster
housing types that is compatible in scale with single-family homes
and that helps to meet the growing demand for walkable urban
living, i.e. must be close to transport infrastructure.
This is not a new type of building, but rather a need that is no
longer catered for in South African cities. Pre-1940 there used to
be a range of building types that existed in cities and towns. Sadly,
this disappeared with modernist town planning in the remainder
of the previous century when work and living became separated
and dependent on automobiles. To facilitate these conditions, city
planning became overly regulated, focusing on single use zoning
with no real consideration of how cities functioned for centuries.
In turn this resulted in unlivable cities, biased towards the ‘have’s’
and marginalising the ‘have-not’s’.
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The result of excessive regulations on cities’ urban form is
firstly low-density sprawl, then dependency on vehicular transport
and finally cities are left with detached single-family homes
(mostly bonded) and mid-rise (four storey & higher housing -
rental, bonded). There is a dire demand for higher density,
walkable urban living with a public transport infrastructure. It is
also essential to have an urban-scale vision for these houses to
secure the sustainability of the development.
Why is there a Missing Middle Housing
problem in South Africa?
Due to excessive regulation (such as the fire regulation and
parking requirements) two and three storey subsidised housing
was removed from the market. The policy requires two- to three
storey buildings to incorporate costly self-closing doors, 1.5m
walkways and two staircases, making it unsuitable for developers
to invest in or to make it affordable to rent or buy.
There is a huge demand for affordable housing in South
Africa: with 65,3% of the population located in urban areas and
a 2,37% population growth according to the World Bank’s 2016
survey, this demand is increasing at a steep trajectory. Affordable
housing is a generic term that is used to characterise the degree to
which residents can afford to rent or buy housing. The mismatch
between demographics (which are also shifting) and available
housing stock is an unfortunate result.
Missing Middle Housing