Property:Cape Town’s housing affordability crisis

One of the articles I read last week was how the rentals for people who are renting in Cape Town, the rate of increase is above the inflation rate, which anyone who's renting will absolutely, absolutely feel because there is such a demand on rental property in Cape Town that the landowners or the landlords rather, And then ladies will be able to, I suppose, put in place an increase of their choosing.

This is having, I suppose, a major impact on ordinary South Africans being able to afford property, particularly in the desirable locations near business nodes in Cape Town, doesn't it?

Absolutely.

It's become so attractive.

And I mean, I think we can understand why when you look at basic service delivery, when you look at how the city looks, how it functions.

it's very attractive.

But being attractive can also come with its challenges, believe it or not.

And, I mean, we've seen it in those prices, and especially the rental prices.

I mean, it's really absorbent.

And it's concerning because you want to know if people can actually afford to live after they've actually paid their rent.

And I'm really left wondering how we can do that.

because the prices are substantially higher than what they should be if you look at the rest of the country in comparison to

Cape Town particularly.

The city of Cape Town needing to submit a progress report to the Constitutional Court following an earlier ruling pertaining to the property Tafelberg High School site in Seapoint.

In that report, they noted that they have approximately 28,400 affordable homes that are in the pipeline.

Some of them delivered obviously imminently.

Others are much longer down the road.

That's not going to be enough, I don't imagine, Bevan, is it?

I'm not even close.

I mean, they all, when you, when people talk about affordable housing, they need to remember that there are sort of categories within affordable housing.

So that'd be RDP houses.

It could be, um, various, various other gap housing, all these other categories.

And I mean, That report where they stated what is available, it's a challenge because city reporting it is a pipeline of more than 14,000 affordable units at different stages of land release, right, or project packaging.

it's not the same thing as actual homes being built and people actually moving in.

And there are different spheres of government that are responsible from national to provincial and then also to local municipalities that have to work together in order to ensure that these homes actually get built.