SA Affordable Housing September / October 2018 // Issue: 72 | Page 29

HOUSING MATTERS
Salt River Market -
let’s build
In 2012 Cape Town’s city planners started a project to package well
located land to be developed that demonstrates the intent of our plans
and policies to transform Cape Town.
By Catherine Stone, city planner
W
e wanted to get our hands dirty figuring out how to
build affordable housing on well located land and
maintain opportunities for inclusion in an area
rapidly gentrifying. The Cape Town Spatial Development
Framework for Cape Town had been approved, we wanted to
put policy into practice. We wanted to see through on our
obligation to use public land as a tool to build the city we
(professionals and citizens) collectively envisioned.
The Salt River Market site has long been in the City’s sight
as an opportunity for redevelopment. It falls at the juncture
of Albert and Voortrekker Roads, a short walk to Salt River
station. A fantastically located site that will also see a MyCiti
service and associated non-motorised movement facilities.
We bought land from Transnet to create a viable
developable area and asked our social housing partners who
would be interested. The basis for doing so was – for South
Africa – a ground-breaking arrangement the City had in place
allowing it t o transact directly with accredited social housing
institutions on an expression of interest and staged basis.
This arrangement is central to making social housing
development in South Africa feasible. Cape Town has been
at the forefront of this initiative to expedite delivery.
Communicare jumped at the opportunity and in 2014 the
council resolved to make the land available to Communicare
for further investigation.
To date, social rental housing (housing that benefits from
discounted rents and assisted by state subsidy) is the only
viable option on the table in South Africa that can bring new,
affordable housing to neighbourhoods that are otherwise
pushing affordable housing out. It is also the only form of
state assisted housing that can achieve the multi-storey-
built form that will make the most of limited public land and
build an efficient, sustainable city.
Communicare has been active in affordable housing in
Cape Town for 80 years. It manages 3 375 rental units across
Cape Town from Rondebosch to Brooklyn. The organisation
is one of only 22 accredited social housing institutions
nationwide that hold social housing rental units. These are
units rented to households that earn between R1 500 and
R15 000 a month.
Catherine Stone, former director for Spatial Planning and Urban
Design at the City of Cape Town.
National government provides a subsidy for the construction
of such housing, but Communicare also has an established
model for cross-subsidising its social rental housing through
the development of affordable and middle-income housing,
which they sell or rent.
To date, Communicare has invested millions of rands into
testing feasible options for the development of the site,
rising to the City’s challenge to meet several policy
objectives at the same time – social inclusion, social
integration, densification, quality public realm creation
– while retaining economic opportunities (formal and
informal) on the site. This is no small challenge; I recently
had an opportunity to see the evolution of these plans.
Land development is a complex and time consuming
process. Public land development has its own set of
additional challenges, not all of which have as yet been
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