CT aces it but Joburg won't even try

I recently attended the Western Cape Property Development Forum at the CTICC and this year it broke its own record with more than 500 attendees. There's a real appetite in this part of the country for property people and government to sit in the same space and talk honestly.

A highlight of the two-day conference was a panel with Premier Alan Winde and Cape Town Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis who were willing to be asked uncomfortable questions. The City of Cape Town and the Western Cape government regularly put their leadership in a room with developers, investors and built-environment professionals whose work is affected by their decisions and allow them to ask hard questions in public. No script, no hiding and no vanishing when it gets awkward. Globally, I would say that this is rare.

Then there's Johannesburg. I have not seen anything close to this kind of open, public engagement between Johannesburg's leadership and its property community. Johannesburg is the country's economic engine and yet the accountability Cape Town treats as normal is missing there.

If Johannesburg wants to unlock anything like Cape Town's energy, it should start with a willingness to show up and be questioned.

Some of what Hill-Lewis shared was almost hard to believe. He mentioned hearing about a developer who had to bring in tower cranes from another province because there weren't enough available to hire in Cape Town. That's how much building is happening. The panel also spoke about George and Mossel Bay merging into one larger metro area thanks to the airport between them, with Cape Town's growth expanding into the Winelands as well.

A few years ago, planners predicted Cape Town would reach eight million people by 2030. Winde thinks that will happen sooner and he's worried about the number after that: 10 million people. Where will they live and will they be able to afford it?

There was another tough number to stomach. The City needs to find around R2 billion to repair damage from recent flooding, with money being diverted from other priorities while the economic cost keeps climbing.

On density, everyone agrees, in theory, that Cape Town needs more housing and fewer informal settlements. But almost everyone also wants the housing built somewhere else, not in their neighbourhood.

I can appreciate how widely Hill-Lewis is looking for answers. He spoke about slum redevelopment in Mumbai, modern metro systems in Delhi and Bangalore and lessons from Mexico City and Manila. The cities sit with vast coastal wealth alongside poverty and are doing a great job of improving in certain areas. They have social contexts similar to ours and might inspire a city like Cape Town.

They added that Cape Town's economy was about a third the size of Johannesburg's. With the current growth rate, the Mother City would need 20 years to catch up to Jozi. Hill-Lewis was quick to say that wasn't a competition. Johannesburg, however strained it looks, is the country's economic engine and South Africa needs it to keep working.

The conversation turned to affordable housing and this is where the City deserves credit but not a free pass. Cape Town has released well-located inner-city land for affordable and social housing, near Woodstock station, on Chiappini Street next to Somerset Road and at Founders Garden. The idea is that the City puts in land and funding upfront, instead of waiting for the private market to solve the problem alone.

But almost nobody has taken it up on it. Developer interest has been surprisingly low. Hill-Lewis seemed stumped by this. Why wouldn't developers want to build on land the City is practically handing them, with funding attached?

Part of the answer comes down to trust. The Conradie Park project apparently went through three or four rounds of tenders, some of which were never opened. The Department of Human Settlements had also promised opportunities by February. The promise came and went with nothing to show for it. When this happens more than once, developers start asking whether it's worth the risk. I think the trust problem is a bigger barrier to affordable housing than funding is.

The scale of what's needed is enormous. Hill-Lewis says the city needs around 30 000 small-scale rental units every year to move people out of shacks and into proper homes at any real pace.

His plan is to work backwards from that number and push through the resistance that's been slowing things, rather than waiting for developers to bring proposals to him. It's a courageous stance.

There's one more obstacle that doesn't get talked about enough: skills. Even if the land, funding and political will line up, Cape Town doesn't have enough trained people to build at the scale its own big projects demand.

Bricklayers and plasterers are on the scarce skills list and the city hasn't properly trained people in the trades for almost 10 years. You can approve as much land as you want but without enough hands to lay the bricks, nothing gets built any faster.

On a bright note, nearly 10 years after it was first set aside, a piece of land in Salt River is finally being turned into 970 affordable and social housing units. It will be a nine-storey building with 670 affordable flats and 300 social housing units. Rentals will range from R700 to R10 000 a month, with households earning up to R34 000 a month qualifying for the affordable units and those under R22 000 for social housing.

The City's contribution is the well-located land. The Social Housing Regulatory Authority is expected to provide a R127 million subsidy for the social housing units.

Anthea Houston, the CEO at Communicare NPC, said the developer was investing R40m of its own money, taking on a further R25m in debt based on its social housing grant application and independently funding the full cost of the 670 affordable flats, bringing the value of the development to close to R1bn. Construction starts in October, completion is targeted for 2028 and it is part of a larger pipeline of more than 3 000 affordable flats under way across the city.

Where does that leave things? Honestly, moving too slowly. Nearly a decade to break ground on one site, tenders that never get opened, promises that slip past their own deadlines. These aren't small delays against a housing backlog that keeps growing every year.

But attitude does count for something. A city that hands over land, goes looking for private capital, changes its own rules when they get in the way and puts its mayor in a room to answer hard questions in public is doing something most South African cities won't attempt.

I left the conference wondering whether the right attitude and slowly improving systems would be enough to keep up with a problem this big or whether Cape Town would spend the next 10 years being praised for trying, while the housing gap it's trying to close keeps growing faster than it can build to close it.