From shacks to new houses

After decades of apartheid-enforced evictions and residential constraints, millions of black South African families live in shacks and other sub-standard housing, making them particularly keen to secure a home of their own. Since 1994, the provincial governments have provided more than 1 mn grants of R16,000 each to help poor communities and families build new houses. According to Minister of Housing Sankie Mathembi-Mahanyele, some 900,000 units had been completed by mid-2000. This fell somewhat short of the original target under the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) of 1 mn new houses by the end of 1999, but nevertheless has been "outstanding in international terms," notes Ms. Mathembi-Mahanyele. Another 2 million families, or about 12 million people, still need access to livable housing.

Given the sheer scale of the problem, the RDP, during its first few years, tended to emphasize quantity over quality. Many of these "RDP houses" were poorly built, in part because of inadequate monitoring of the developers contracted to implement the schemes. Many houses also are tiny, spawning countless jokes: "The RDP houses are so small that if you lie down to sleep, your feet stick out the front door." "They are so small that you have to go outside to change your mind."

More recently, legislation has been passed to ensure minimum standards for RDP houses, and a new housing strategy currently in preparation will direct more of the subsidies to individual families, rather than to developers. Beyond the RDP programme, a number of other schemes for low-cost housing also are under way, some with support from non-governmental organizations and donor agencies. So far, however, "the banks are still not playing their role fully," complains Ms. Mathembi-Mahanyele, reflecting a broader problem poor blacks have in securing credit from the banking system.

Through organization, hard work and some outside assistance, a number of communities are overcoming such obstacles through their own initiative. On a hillside in Newlands, just outside the port city of Durban, dozens of families are building their own houses. Members of the nationwide South African Homeless People’s Federation, they are developing some 155 houses. Although they receive technical assistance from the People’s Housing Partnership Trust (funded by the UN Development Programme, US Agency for International Development and South Africa’s Ministry of Housing), most of the labour and financing is their own.

Almost all the families, overwhelmingly headed by women, were previously evicted from various other shantytowns and settlement sites. Thanks to a request by the UN Development Programme, the Durban authorities agreed they could settle on municipal land in Newlands, with the city installing water taps. Then a few families at a time began putting up houses, financed largely by their own savings. After choosing the floor plan they prefer and purchasing building supplies in bulk, groups of women then work with each other to mix and pour the cement foundations. They then pay three construction workers R50 each to put up the walls and roofs, a process that usually takes three days per house.

Compared with the RDP houses, the Newlands buildings are both larger (four and a half rooms each) and cheaper (R12,500 instead of R16,000). The key ingredient, community leader Thembelihle Mkhize told a group of UN visitors in October 1999, is the women’s ability to mobilize their "sweat equity." Their success, she said, could help inspire homeless people elsewhere in South Africa. "Why should we live in backyards, or under bridges?" she asked. "Let us stand up and also be counted."