The challenges of providing affordable rental housing in the Pretoria inner city and surrounding areas through the Social Housing Programme (SHP)

Abstract

Rental housing has always provided a solution to urban settlements across the globe, with approximately 1.2 billion people reported to be living in rented accommodation in 2016. Economic migration to urban areas has contributed significantly to the demand for rental accommodation across major urban centres in South Africa. Research undertaken in the late 1990s, estimated the number of South African households living in shacks, hostels, and outbuildings in urban areas, at 1,075,000. After 1994, the South African government introduced the Institutional Subsidy as a rental subsidy instrument to assist institutions that provided affordable rental accommodation or instalment sale to low income groups. This was followed by the introduction of the social housing policy in 2005, which focussed on addressing spatial restructuring of urban settlements in order to redress structural, economic, social and spatial dysfunctionalities in major urban areas. This study focussed on the challenges experienced by the social housing sector, in providing affordable rental housing in the Pretoria inner city and the surrounding areas. It was an objective of this study to understand the key obstacles faced by the social housing sector in scaling up delivery of social housing rental stock in the City of Tshwane