SA Affordable Housing September / October 2018 // Issue: 72 | Seite 16

AFFORDABLE HOUSING CONFERENCE
All affordable housing
stakeholders to work together
Local and international speakers recently gathered at the Cape Town
Marriot Hotel, Crystal Towers, to attend the fifth annual Affordable
Housing Africa conference.
By Cherry Ellis
“T
his event is designed to enable industry role
players and their organisations to learn and
benefit from the experience of the leading
companies within the housing industry,” says a spokesper-
son for organiser marcus evans.
In his keynote speech, Bonginkosi Madikizela, provincial
minister of Human Settlements, Western Cape Government,
addressed improving overall housing delivery to maximise
the social and economic benefits of urbanisation.
He mentioned that human settlement challenges include:
• The delivery challenge: the inability of the current
delivery model to address the scale of demand.
• The modality challenge: the outcome which the current
delivery model has had on urban and spatial forms of
towns and cities.
• The governance challenge: the complexity of the
decision-making frameworks which underpin the
current model. •
Madikizela says that the state should shift its role to:
• Create conditions which support communities and the
private sector.
• Focus its efforts on aligning important public
investments.
• Enable markets to function by allowing communities
and the private sector to take over the role of housing
provision. “Combat low-density sprawl by
applying a ‘minimum-density
threshold’ on well located land:
prioritise multi-story development.”
“More specifically, the state should enable these actors to
invest in housing and businesses; leverage the public value
created by state investments; adapt state investments to suit
local needs and demands; and create employment
opportunities at local level,” he says.
He outlined a delivery guidance for measures for a living
Cape to:
• Repurpose existing grant-and-subsidy systems to invest
in well located land in neighbourhoods already rich in
opportunities.
• Focus on demand-side subsidies (not supply side), both
credit and non-credit linked, as well as demand-side
rental subsidies.
• Use a portfolio approach to urban asset management
– think strategically, rather than making ad hoc decisions. The way forward, he says, “If the Living Cape: Human
Settlements Framework is to be effective and transformative
all stakeholders involved in the development of sustainable
human settlements will need to work together. Initiatives
should be undertaken across spheres and departments, in
new and innovative ways and with the private sector and
civil society,” he concludes.
Other speakers touched on developing higher density
affordable housing, integrating affordable housing into cities
for conducive mixed used communities, bridging the
affordability gap, providing cost-effective, high density
homes with a level of sensitivity to appealing and design
and stepping onto the home ownership ladder.
SA Affordable Housing will take a closer look at these and
other issues in upcoming editions.
14
SEPTEMBER - OCTOBER 2018
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Disincentivise land holding and speculation by
increasing taxes on underdeveloped land in dense
areas.
Combat low-density sprawl by applying a ‘minimum-
density threshold’ on well located land: prioritise
multi-story development.
By pursuing public infrastructure optimisation such as
perimeter of ‘school site’. development, almost 16% of
the registered housing backlog could be met in the
metro.
Foster engagement between small and large builders to
enable skills transfer.
Create a strong institutional platform which can support
knowledge production, knowledge sharing and strategic
coordination of investment efforts.
Move away from single-sector output indicators towards
cross sectoral indicators that measure the outcomes of
human settlement investments in a more holistic way.
- Bonginkosi Madikizela