Human Settlements

1. Each municipality maintains and manages their own housing demand database.

The City of Cape Town recorded: 164 709.

             The non-metro areas: 120 641.

2. My department’s approach to address backyard dwellers is to ensure that all households living in overcrowded formal areas are provided an appropriate number of housing opportunities within each project undertaken by the municipality. This is achieved by encouraging municipalities to strike an appropriate balance between informal settlement dwellers and people living in overcrowded formal areas across housing projects. Each municipality decides on the number and size of greenfield and Upgrade of Informal Settlement Projects (UISP) projects over the planning period (a 5-year period). This decision should be informed by the “profile” of need in a municipality i.e. number of informal settlement dwellers without individual services versus the number of people living in formal areas without adequate access to individual services.

My Department’s “Provincial Framework Policy for the Selection of Housing Beneficiaries” provides for this balancing in each municipality.  The Framework states that balancing should occur over successive multi-year planning periods and over the portfolio of human settlement projects planned and executed in a municipality.

Projects in which my department is the developer may fall outside of the municipality’s housing plans and portfolio of housing projects, as in the City of Cape Town.  For this reason, in Departmental projects my department may engage with the municipality to include registered households living in the formal area surrounding the project site.  This inclusion in the project is to ensure that an appropriate balance is struck in the provision of subsidy housing opportunities between those living in overcrowded formal areas and those living in informal areas.