The City’s Human Settlements Directorate has been lauded for its top performance, spending 99,3% of its more than R880 million capital budget in the 2022/23 financial year. This is money being spent on directly improving the living conditions of vulnerable households and providing and enabling decent accommodation. In addition, the directorate spent nearly 100% of its informal settlements and urban settlements grant funding. Some R2,5 billion capital budget has been allocated for human settlements projects over the next three years. Read more below:
This is a feat of note and I congratulate every single official and contractor in our human settlements team for this achievement. The incredible performance is not just nice on paper. It shows a real impact on the lives of our residents. It shows we spend budgets on the people it is earmarked for; and it clearly shows that we are ready to scale-up our efforts in collaboration with the private sector.
‘If we want to ramp up our efforts and deliver more opportunities in well-located areas across the metro, the City needs to become more of an enabler of opportunities than the sole provider. Programmes must be based on greater partnerships and more land parcels must be unlocked for human settlements. This includes the large pieces of well-located National Government land. We estimate that 100 000 social housing opportunities are possible at sites such as Wingfield, Youngsfield, Ysterplaat and the Parliamentary village. The release of these national mega-properties for housing would make a huge difference given the sheer scale of the well-located military land compared to the very limited land with housing potential owned by the City and the Western Cape Government close to the urban centres. Imagine what we could do with more land, more funds and greater partnerships. We could truly Build Cape Town, together,’ said the City’s Acting Mayoral Committee Member for Human Settlements, Alderman James Vos.
Land acquisitions and the development of affordable residential opportunities in well-located areas, maintenance of the City’s rental units, the no-cost title deed transfer programme, upgrading of informal settlements and backyarder services, and construction of new Breaking New Ground homes, and incremental developments are key pillars of City delivery.
Public private partnerships are vital and a key thrust of delivery at scale going forward.
As such, a new programme was created and in the first year of the Mayoral Priority Programme for affordable housing land release, several sites received critical City Council land release approvals, including:
- Newmarket Street (Cape Town) – 200 social housing units
- Salt River Market (Salt River) – 215 social housing units
- Pickwick (Salt River) – 600 social housing units
- Fruit and Veg (CBD) – 180 social housing units
- Earl Street (Woodstock) – 160 social housing units
‘Overall, the City has 6 500 social housing units in the planning pipeline across 50 land parcels City-wide,’ said Alderman Vos.
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