Cape Town Housing Demand Tops 3,000 A Month As Waiting List Passes 490,000
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Cape Town's housing waiting list has reached 490,314 and demand is growing by more than 3,000 households a month, far outpacing the delivery of state-subsidised homes, Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis says.
Cape Town's housing crisis is growing at a pace that far outstrips the city's ability to provide state-subsidised homes, Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis said, with the metro's housing waiting list standing at 490,314 and rising daily.
Hill-Lewis said housing demand in the city is growing by more than 3,000 a month, while the roughly R1 billion a year the city receives from the state for housing enables it to deliver about 3,000 subsidised units a year — “less than what the housing demand grows per month.”
He said the allocation has remained broadly consistent over the past decade, but inflation has reduced its purchasing power by about 40% in real terms, and the state cannot meet demand through existing delivery models and resources alone. “That's why we have to get creative about delivery models and start to find ways to partner with the private sector,” he said.
The city has delivered 12,401 homes over the past five years, which Hill-Lewis said is more than double the next-best metropolitan municipality and the highest number in South Africa, though he acknowledged the figure remains small against the scale of demand.
Cape Town's long-term planning indicates it holds enough city-owned land to meet affordable housing demand through to 2040, including social housing, gap housing and mixed-income developments. Hill-Lewis said the constraint is that there is not enough money to develop that land at the required scale.
The city has introduced what he described as South Africa's first state-land discount guidelines, allowing city-owned land to be discounted by up to 90% where it delivers genuinely affordable or social housing, alongside rates and service-charge discounts aimed at keeping rents affordable. He said the city is increasingly looking to private-sector partnerships and “microdevelopers”, including helping them meet the cost of connecting developments to bulk services.
The remarks follow the city and the Western Cape provincial government filing affidavits with the Constitutional Court outlining their affordable and well-located housing efforts, in a matter relating to the Tafelberg case and subsequent proceedings.