SA Affordable Housing September / October 2018 // Issue: 72 | Page 17

AFFORDABLE HOUSING CONFERENCE
Future Africa is calling for
innovative African solutions
Marcus Evans’ fifth annual Affordable Housing Africa Conference provided
the ideal opportunity for policymakers and practitioners to reflect on our
approaches to providing affordable housing on the continent.
By Anthea Houston, CEO Communicare NPC
J
ust how adequate are our efforts in providing affordable
housing across the continent when there is a gross
under-supply of mortgages and housing products into this
market?
In the main, our housing programmes continue to respond to
the growing demand of rapidly urbanising populations,
burgeoning informal settlements with the delivery of
traditional single-storey houses on single plots along with
free-hold title.
Unfortunately, this response has long ago outlived its useful
life. With serviced land costly and scarce, we must use every
inch of it far more strategically to provide more
environmentally, financially and socially sustainable housing.
Our efforts to replace this model with African solutions that are
effective, given our context, needs to accelerate.
Africa remains one of the least dense continents but our
population is set to double from 1.2 billion people in 2016 to
2.4 billion in 2050. According to the United Nations (World
Population Prospects 2017) this boom will take place in the
sub-Sahara and 80% of the continent’s population will be
urbanised by 2050. While Africa currently faces growing youth
unemployment, it is estimated that 60% of the African
population will be under the age of 25 years old by 2050.
This ‘future Africa’ provides us as practitioners and
policymakers with the opportunity to generate unique African
solutions that respond to our continent’s peculiar challenges.
As providers of housing, we must remain focused on ‘future
Africa’ and challenge ourselves by asking: do our housing
solutions fit the size of the problem? Are we thinking far
enough into the future? Are we thinking big enough?
For example, are we embracing higher densities and a
variety of tenure models to develop housing more sustainably?
In Africa we often argue that people will not live in higher
densities. However, when we do so we ignore the
phenomenally high densities found in well-located informal
settlements where millions of African people already live.
By locating in such dense settlements, people demonstrate
their willingness to sacrifice cultural or personal preferences in
favour of residing in a location in close proximity to economic
opportunity. Nevertheless we forget about ‘future Africa’ and
continue to develop low density housing products despite the
challenge of accessing sufficient serviced land.
A guest speaker at the fifth annual Affordable Housing
conference held in Cape Town, Anthea Houston, chief executive
officer of Communicare NPC.
Land and housing prices are rising in our property markets
– partly as a product of growing inequality and also as a
product of low levels of regulation. The spending power of the
continent’s upper classes, its institutional investors and of
purchasers from developed economies create an environment
in which those in the affordable housing market cannot begin
to compete.
Some African states have been reluctant to intervene to
protect the interests of those in need of housing. The free-
marketeers argue that state interference in the land and
property markets will result in the destruction of value. The
state, therefore retreats, fearing that property developers and
investors will be scared off.
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