Inclusionary Housing Policy in Cities of the South: Navigating a Path Between Continuity and Disruption

Abstract

Inclusionary housing policy (IHP) encourages developers to provide affordable housing in well-located areas. This can add to their costs and risks, so the process of policy adoption is complicated and contested. This paper provides a synthesis of the literature and then analyzes the efforts to implement IHP of two South African cities, Johannesburg and Cape Town. The core proposition is that making residential development more inclusive requires at least three ingredients to ensure meaningful change. First, the case for reform needs popular support and an active civil society to secure the backing of political leaders and officials facing resistance from entrenched real estate interests. Second, the policy needs to be feasible in an economic sense and calibrated in an incremental way that will not jeopardize private investment. Third, a robust legal framework is required to institutionalize the changes and to limit disputes and disruption.

Keywords:

• Real estate
• social justice
• exclusionary property markets
• affordable housing
• inclusionary zoning
• land use planning

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Inclusionary housing is sometimes referred to as “inclusionary zoning” (IZ) because the requirement to build affordable housing may be implemented through an area’s zoning code. We use the broader term of inclusionary housing in the paper because similar requirements can also be imposed outside the zoning code (Jacobus, 2015).

2 According to the constitution, housing is a shared responsibility between the national and provincial governments. In practice, national government is mainly responsible for housing policy, the funding framework, and setting norms and standards, and provincial governments for implementation through housing projects and subsidies. Municipalities are mainly responsible for the associated infrastructure (roads, water, sanitation, electricity, waste removal) and for planning and managing land for housing developments. Their role in approving land-use planning applications is crucial to negotiating the provision of inclusionary housing by developers.

3 Department of Environmental Affairs & Development Planning (DEADP)’s Minister, Tasneem Essop v. SLC Property Group (Pty) Ltd and Longlands Holdings (Pty) Ltd.

4 Despite the mandatory inclusion of inclusionary housing in the 2008 Growth Management Strategy, part of the Spatial Development Framework generally never applied (Cogger & Park-Ross, 2022).

5 Unfortunately, the data is not disaggregated so it is not possible at present to get a sense of the type, price, or location of the inclusionary housing. The City intends to make their monitoring and evaluation more sophisticated in the future.

6 For example, the developer of an apartment block offered anyone purchasing the penthouse flat (costing $1.3 million) a free Jaguar SUV worth more than $60,000 (Villette, 2017).

7 They included the Social Justice Coalition, Ndifuna Ukwazi (NU) and Reclaim the City (Hendricks, 2019).

8 An MPT is analogous to a planning board or planning commission in other countries.

9 NU even took the City to court in 2019 for its failure to adopt an IHP. Shortly afterward, the City announced that it would develop a policy by 2021, but this failed to materialize (Cogger & Park-Ross, 2023).

10 The discussion of IHP in this article, and in most of the literature cited, is located within the context of a market economy, where most property is privately owned, most development is funded and organized by private companies, and the powers of the state are circumscribed. These boundaries are not inherent or immutable. There are other policy options and ways of providing houses and developing cities. They would require far-reaching changes in the political-economic system, which this article does not consider.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ivan Turok

Professor Ivan Turok holds the NRF South African Research Chair in City–Region Economies in the Department of Economics and Finance at the University of the Free State, and is Distinguished Research Specialist at the Human Sciences Research Council in South Africa.

Margot Rubin

Dr Margot Rubin is a lecturer at the School of Geography and Planning, Cardiff University, Wales, UK.

Andreas Scheba

Dr Andreas Scheba is an Associate Professor in the Centre for Development Support at the University of the Free State, and is Senior Research Specialist at the Human Sciences Research Council in South Africa.