BREAKING NEW GROUND: THE EVOLUTION OF HOUSING POLICY IN SOUTH AFRICA

ABOUT 12 million citizens, which is nearly one-fifth of South Africa’s population, now live in state subsidised homes.

- PREVIN VEDAN

Yet, numbers tell only part of the story. Early housing policy was not without flaws.

In the rush to address the backlog, many RDP houses were built on cheap land far from city centers - essentially continuing apartheid’s peripheral spatial planning - and were often of poor quality due to shoddy contractors.

Rows of identical, hastily built boxes sprang up on the urban periphery - barren, desolate developments that critics said echoed the spatial logic of apartheid both in style and in isolation. Moreover, the allocation of these houses quickly became a contentious issue.

In the 1990s, housing waiting lists were maintained by municipalities, hopeful beneficiaries would apply and wait their turn. This system soon grew unwieldy and mistrusted. Scarce housing stock and ever lengthening lists were a recipe for frustration.

Accusations mounted that local officials were taking bribes to push certain names to the top of the lists, or that politically-connected individuals were “jumping the queue” ahead of those who had waited patiently for years.

In some small towns, the housing officer - the clerk who kept the list - wielded inordinate power and sometimes succumbed to corruption or nepotism. Communities frequently protested, believing that outsiders or latecomers were being given homes ahead of them by dishonest means.

The very phrase “waiting list” became synonymous with broken promises as people found themselves waiting not months but decades.

By the early 2000s, the government acknowledged the system was failing. In 2004, a new comprehensive plan called “Breaking New Ground” (BNG) was adopted.