The City of Cape Town has told the Western Cape High Court it plans to build about 28,400 affordable homes. All of them still need to be built, GroundUp reported.
The City filed the report on the order of the Constitutional Court. According to the report, none of the affordable housing projects approved since 2017 for the CBD, Salt River, Woodstock, Observatory or Sea Point has been completed.
“To get these projects through the sausage machine of the state is like trying to swim through peanut butter,” Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis told the Cape Town Press Club in June.
“Trying to pry subsidies out of the state to make those projects more viable and more affordable has been incredibly difficult,” the mayor said.
In July, the Constitutional Court ruled that the sale of the Tafelberg School property in Sea Point was unlawful. The sale has since been cancelled. The court said the City and the Western Cape government must provide well-located affordable housing to undo apartheid spatial planning.
The only housing the City has finished in the inner city areas is a 39-unit transitional facility in Salt River. It opened in 2019 for families moved from another site.
The report lists 19 inner city sites, set to provide about 6,800 affordable homes. Six have been given to developers, some as far back as 2019. Two of those sales are now being cancelled, and 13 sites have not yet been released.
Under the City’s definition, affordable housing is mostly rental homes for households earning between R1,850 and R34,800 a month.
Many projects were meant to be paid for by the Social Housing Regulatory Authority (SHRA), a national agency. But its budget has never been big enough. The City said no grant money has been released for projects on City land since 2021, despite six applications.
The City said in its report that the national grant for social housing has dropped by 41% since 2017, after adjusting for inflation and population growth.
The City has now moved to a model without direct state subsidies. It sells City land to private developers at a discount. The developers build blocks that mix affordable rentals with market rate units.
For example, the old Fruit and Veg site in Zonnebloem, valued at R72-million, is being sold for about R10-million. It is due to be transferred to a developer this month, with 285 affordable units and 25 open market units planned.
Ground has been broken at only one site in the pipeline. Demolitions and earthworks have started at the Salt River Market, sold to Communicare in 2022. Building work is set to begin in January 2027, the court report says.
Other sites have been delayed. In Woodstock, two sites at Pine Road and Dillon Lane were sold to SOHCO in 2019. Both sales are now being cancelled after the SHRA declined to fund Pine Road.
About 365 households still live at the Woodstock Hospital, which Reclaim the City occupied in 2017. The City now plans 500 non-subsidised affordable units there.
Average rents in the Western Cape rose 9.7% in the year to June 2026, according to the PayProp Rental Index. The City has rejected calls for rent control.
Jens Horber, a researcher at Ndifuna Ukwazi, said only about 3% to 4% of the national human settlements budget goes to social housing. “This has been made worse by severe governance issues at the SHRA,” he said.
Carl Pophaim, mayco member for human settlements, said rents in the new projects will be spread across different income levels. “The City will monitor affordability levels within all the developments released,” he said.
A development in Pickwick Street, Salt River, will only be transferred to Instratin in March next year. Building there is set to start in April or May.
Source: this article is based on reporting by GroundUp. Image: GroundUp. Written with the help of AI and published by the Tzaneen Voice News desk. See our Editorial Standards.
Kgomotso Maake covers news and politics for Tzaneen Voice. Kgomotso reports on government, Parliament, municipalities, courts, crime and service delivery across South Africa, with a close eye on how national decisions reach towns like Tzaneen and the wider Limpopo province. Stories are written in plain English and focus on the facts: who made the decision, what it means, and what happens next.