If time could be reversed by a quarter century, would SA still choose the public housing policies it did? If not, how different might life be now?
In the late 1990s the government decided to build as many houses as possible as quickly as it could. The results were extraordinary by any measure. By 2010 a staggering one in five South Africans lived in a home their democratic government had built for them. Few national public housing programmes in modern history have obtained greater reach.
But achieving such scale came at a price. The same tiny house was replicated more than 3-million times on cheap land on the periphery of every city and town, thus entrenching the spatial pathologies of apartheid.
The economic and psychological damage is inestimable. How diminished people feel when they are placed at the edge of the city amid endless rows of identical houses is hard to know. To what extent the high unemployment rate is a consequence of the geographical marginalisation of the poor is impossible to calculate.
So what were the alternatives? One would have been to distribute public housing as evenly as possible throughout the inner cities and the middle-class suburbs. The cultural and economic virtues are self-evident. Integrating the poor into the worlds of the well-off is good for everyone. The poor get the benefit of institutions historically reserved for the middle class — parks, libraries, adequate sports facilities, and, most importantly, schools. And middle-class people engage face to face with those unlike them, which makes the country they live in feel less alien.
Quite how much human capital, social cohesion and general wellbeing have been lost because this path was not taken is, once more, incalculable. How many young people who entered adulthood unemployed would be working had they lived closer to the mainstream we cannot know.
So why was another path not taken? I can think of at least two reasons. One is that building public housing in the heartland of the economy is slow and costly. Land is expensive and making it available difficult. In the late 1990s the ANC was desperate to show as many people as possible what it could do for them. Building millions of houses meant touching millions of souls. And a house was so tangible, so concrete. The political cost of moving too slowly — of building, say, 300,000 homes instead of 3-million — might have been severe. I’m not sure that the government had the courage to take that risk, and who can blame it?
There is a second reason a better path was not taken. If distributing public housing across the suburbs is going to work, the distribution must be even. If it isn’t, middle-class residents will simply leave the suburbs in which public housing is built and live in suburbs where it isn’t. The suburban real estate market would go haywire as land values plummet in some zones, making them suburban ghettos, and rocket in others. If public housing is distributed everywhere there is nowhere else for middle-class people to go.
But a programme on that scale would have required subsidised land purchases and a degree of compensated expropriation. And the white middle classes of the late 1990s would simply not have allowed for that. Acquiring land for public transport has been difficult enough — Rea Vaya was meant to run down Oxford Road to Rosebank, but was scuppered by powerful resistance. Imagine the outcry if the purpose had been to house the poor.
White SA made a deal in the 1990s. It would accept democracy if life went on as before. A sensible public housing policy was not on the list of acceptable measures. It was in effect banned by the politics of the times. The spatial geography of postapartheid SA may be crazy, but it is what a swathe of the middle class demanded.
• Steinberg teaches African studies at Oxford University.
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