Housing Policy and the Post-apartheid City: A Tale of Urban Exclusion Through Housing Delivery

Abstract

Housing policy in the apartheid period was a central tool of social, spatial and economic exclusion, and contributed much to the race-based exclusionary character of South African cities. The need to foster urban inclusion was therefore necessarily a central theme of the urban policy of the future. As such, the post-apartheid housing policy of 1994, among others, reflects the notion of inclusion of the urban poor in the city through housing. Two principal elements of such inclusion are location and ownership. Location’s importance is in its attendant qualities of access to services and proximity to socio-economic opportunities by low income households, while ownership is understood to support household wealth creation. The post-apartheid housing policy and its resulting delivery however remain rooted in a neoliberal macroeconomic context, which has, in effect, entrenched the economic inequalities that were already at the heart of urban exclusion in South Africa. The chapter traces the inclusionary intents and outcomes of housing policy implementation since 1994, and explains the inadvertent exclusionary results of housing practice. It is argued that the protected land market is central to the failure of the post-apartheid urban inclusion experiment, and of the achievement of spatial and economic justice by the urban poor through the post-apartheid subsidized housing programme. Through such programme therefore, unequal access to the city persists.