The Western Cape Property Development Forum (WCPDF) has released a position paper, ‘Enabling the Delivery of Housing in South Africa’, providing insights and recommendations from the built environment.
While the paper refers to the common areas of challenges around housing delivery, highlighted through the experience of property developers in the region, it also places a focus on common challenges throughout the country.
“Taken individually, the key findings in the paper are not new. They have been debated and discussed in forums and industry groupings for many years, and much research has been undertaken across various subsectors within the housing market,” comments Deon van Zyl, WCPDF chairperson. “However, by consolidating the essence of development experiences into one working document, this paper is being published to encourage the crucial collaboration required to take on the obstacles that unnecessarily inhibit housing delivery.”
The paper has received extensive input over the past year from the WCPDF’s Workgroup on Housing as well as parts of the built environment that works extensively in the development of housing and in particular, affordable housing, such as the Development Action Group (DAG) and the Township Developers Forum of the Western Cape (TDFoWC).
“This paper aims to get the production line of property going. It suggests opportunities towards practical discussions on innovative financial thinking, affordability, cost, the regulatory and legislative processes, incentives, experimentation and ultimately delivery. It also highlights the need to understand the requirements of the end user across the spread of product,” notes Harold Spies, convenor of the WCPDF Workgroup.
The position unpacks challenges experienced by the Western Cape’s property development community while presenting possible solutions around:
- The question of equity and the need for innovation around traditional financing, posing ideas such as the possible breaking down of finance into sub-parts of a development; reaching an understanding with traditional financiers around which part of the production line holds the highest risk for banks; reconsidering ownership of lands towards establishing equity; and the need to establish more innovative financial solutions around the micro-development sector. It also looks towards the establishment of a South African-wide government fund which could act not as a lender but rather as a guarantor for affordable developments, within strict guidelines.
- The need for reliable and consistent data to define ‘affordable’ market demand.
- Overcoming hurdles around government legislation and policy requirements by understanding the disconnect between what happens on the ground versus what legislation dictates in theory; tackling the delays caused in production timelines; and the ongoing deterioration of implementing agents within local municipalities. The paper also urges the use of private sector expertise towards policy decision making and asks government to define its role in terms of whether it should be a facilitator or enabler of housing delivery.
- The urgent need to address human capital in the industry across the board, from lack of non-tertiary skills to current capacity within government; as well as the hemorrhaging of professionals and skills out of South Africa.
- The construction mafia and the critical need for not only comprehensive reporting by the industry of matters to authorities as a Schedule 5 crime, but also the critical need to for the property development sector to grasp the importance of comprehensive community engagement from conceptualisation of any project.
“It is crucial for our private sector members to hold each other accountable for the challenges we create ourselves. This extends from the approach of private sector developers in the provision of affordable housing to consultants and contractors being realistic and honest about whether their capacity actually exists within their own entities to tender in the first place, or where the quality of tender submissions is simply not good enough,” stresses van Zyl.
“Just as we call on government and financial institutions, it is also critical that we call on our entire industry to not only uphold professional standards but actively and collaboratively be prepared to work with all groupings within our sector, private and public alike, if we are really sincere about growing and transforming our industry and economy.”
