Cape Town’s housing crisis is becoming a labour crisis, report warns

Cape Town’s housing crisis is increasingly becoming an economic and labour problem as working families are priced out of areas close to jobs and forced to spend more of their income and time travelling between home and work.

Housing advocacy organisation Ndifuna Ukwazi says the city’s affordability crisis has reached a point where large portions of the population can no longer realistically afford to live near employment, schools, healthcare and reliable public transport. According to the organisation, 76% of Cape Town residents earn below R22,000 a month, 58% below R10,000 and 25% below R3,500. Using common affordability measures — that housing costs should account for no more than about a third of household income — it said more than half of Cape Town’s population could not afford rent or bond repayments above roughly R3,333 a month.

Yusrah Bardien, communications and engagements officer at Ndifuna Ukwazi, described Cape Town as facing an “extreme, escalating urban housing crisis”, arguing that decades of market-led development and insufficient use of well-located public land for social housing had reinforced existing spatial inequality. She referred to what has been described as the “40x40x40 syndrome”: households living in homes of around 40 square metres, as far as 40 kilometres from work, while spending up to 40% of their income on transport.

Dawie Roodt, chief economist at the Efficient Group, said the affordability problem could not be separated from South Africa’s weak economic growth, adding that lower-income households were not seeing their earnings keep pace with rental and housing costs. He said Cape Town could ease pressure by making residential development faster and less costly, with less red tape and more land opened up for housing. Labour lawyer Wendel Bloem said employees are generally expected to arrange their own transport unless their employment contracts provide for travel allowances or accommodation, and acknowledged that increasingly long and expensive commutes place a heavy burden on low-paid workers.

The issue has also become a political battleground. GOOD Party MPL Brett Herron said that “thirty years into democracy, the map of who lives where in Cape Town still looks very much like the map apartheid drew”, and called for public land to be used as an equity contribution to affordable housing rather than sold. ANC leader of the opposition in the Western Cape legislature, Muhammed Khalid Sayed, said housing was “fundamentally a question of dignity, affordability and access to opportunity”.

Mayoral committee member for human settlements Carl Pophaim said land parcels with a potential yield of more than 14,000 affordable units were in the active land-release or project-packaging stage, while a further 7,000 units were linked to land already awarded to developers. He said more than 6,000 social housing units were already operating in Cape Town and the City had released land valued at R1.7 billion for affordable housing over the past two years, with around 4,000 affordable units entering construction in the central city this year. Pophaim called for greater national funding and the release of large state-owned properties such as Ysterplaat, Youngsfield, Wingfield and Culemborg, and said Cape Town would need more than one million additional housing units by 2050.