Cape Town de-risks affordable housing to attract private investment
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Cape Town is packaging and de-risking city-owned land to draw private capital into affordable housing, with over R7 billion in land released since its Mayoral Priority Programme began.
The City of Cape Town is making a direct pitch to developers, banks and investors to help turn city-owned land into affordable housing at scale, saying government cannot build its way out of the housing challenge alone.
Through its Housing Investment Connect programme, the city says it can de-risk land, lower development barriers and use public investment to make projects more attractive to private capital.
Carl Pophaim, the city's mayoral committee member for human settlements, said the administration has released just over R7 billion worth of city-owned land to the market since the inception of the Mayoral Priority Programme, equating to a conservative 24,000 housing opportunities. Of those, 9,000 are currently on their way to council and 4,000 are ready to be developed.
Pophaim said the city completes land-use processes, viability studies and approvals before sites go to market, taking significant risk off the shoulders of developers and financiers.
The programme is intended to redress apartheid spatial planning while growing the Cape Town economy, with city officials arguing the opportunity is profitable for investors as well as socially significant.
The city is targeting private capital to accelerate affordable housing delivery, with officials highlighting a discounted land offer, a multi-thousand-unit pipeline and billions of rands in potential development value.