Cape Town Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis has announced that the City is tabling two more major projects for social housing.

Speaking at the Council meeting earlier, he announced the tabling of the final handing over of the Salt River Market property to the social housing institution for construction.

The Pickwick Road site, also in Salt River, is also expected to be tabled for final approval for release for social housing.

Both sites are on City-owned land.

Hill-Lewis says together these projects will unlock over 800 new social housing units in Salt River.

This is what the two mixed-use developments will look like:

• Overall, the Salt River Market development comprises 723 affordable units, and 216 social housing units.
• This will be cross-subsidised by offices, community facilities, and markets set around a vibrant public square.
• The property is also in close proximity to key public transport interchanges. It is across the road from Salt River Station (where Northern, Central and Southern Lines converge), as well as MyCiti Route 261, which connects Century City to the City Bowl via Voortrekker Road, and Route 102, which connects Salt River Station to the CBD via Woodstock, Walmer Estate and District 6.
• Pickwick Road in Salt River is set to deliver 600 social housing units as part of an 8-storey mixed-use development.

With the latest release of Salt River Market, the City now has over 800 inner city social housing units in the construction phase via social housing partners. The other projects are:

• Maitland with approximately 200 social housing units
• Pine Road in Woodstock with approximately 240 social housing units
• Dillon Lane, also in Woodstock, with 150 social housing units
• Projects in the land-use management phase include Newmarket Street (+- 200 units), and Woodstock Hospital precinct, where around 700 social housing units have been delayed after the building was “hi-jacked” in March 2017.

Hill-Lewis says at the heart of addressing the dignity of each family, and of giving people a sense that their life can get better, is decent affordable housing:

We want every person in Cape Town, and those who move here from elsewhere, to know and feel that this is a place where they have a decent chance of building a better life for themselves. That this City offers them a better hope of finding work, a better hope of a future of opportunity for their children, and the optimism that the present painful reality of poverty can be overcome in time.

The Mayor says the future of affordable housing delivery is not going to be in the free housing space, and is not going to be delivered by the state.

If we intend to make any meaningful dent on the demand for housing in our cities that we need to, then it will be through unlocking micro-developers, social housing companies, and private sector delivery.

In January, I formed a Priority Programme on Affordable Housing. Since then we have been meeting monthly to drive progress in four main areas:

We are cutting the red tape that makes it difficult for the private sector to deliver thousands more affordable homes.

Council has already considered the first step in the process for a meaningful amendment to the Municipal Planning By-law to achieve this end.

We are making it easier for micro-developers to deliver more rental units.

We will soon offer planning support officers in townships, with off-the-shelf pre-approved building plans for rental units.

He says the City is also pushing forward with  calls for national government to release the huge pieces of unused state land in the city, which he says are at least 77 times the size of the land the City owns.

I have met with the national Minister of Public Works, Minister de Lille, to get an update on these mega-properties, and I am counting on her to keep up the interest she had in these sites as Mayor, now that she controls them.