Housing remains an emotional issue, as former housing director-general Billy Cobbett well knows (and as the recent policy spat between former housing minister Lindiwe Sisulu and her successor, Tokyo Sexwale, would seem to confirm).
Cobbett was appointed DG by the new SA's first housing minister, Joe Slovo. He is now manager of Cities Alliance in Washington, a group formed by UN Habitat and the World Bank to develop innovative approaches to urban poverty. "The period after 1994 was a huge challenge in terms of housing," says Cobbett. "We were trying to implement non racial housing policies, yet were required to work within the existing legal and institutional framework. Expectations were high for the rapid delivery of new housing to communities that had been historically excluded."
Cobbett was removed from his position as DG after a difference with then housing minister Sankie Mthembi-Mahanyele over the circumstances surrounding the awarding of a R190m contract to construction firm Motheo in Mpumalanga. He then spent a year as Cape Town housing director, but was forced to leave the country in 1998 when gangsters from the Cape Flats threatened his family after he slammed their involvement in housing allocation.
"I always regarded the housing backlog as a long-term challenge, with the immediate priority to establish an institutional and policy framework that could serve the country for one or two decades," he says.
After working for UN Habitat in Nairobi, he was seconded by the UN to the World Bank and to Cities Alliance, which supports cities that seek assistance with upgrading informal settlements. The organisation is a partnership of more than 20 members, among them key bilateral agencies and six developing countries: SA, Brazil, Nigeria, Ethiopia, the Philippines and Chile. He has been with Cities Alliance since 2006 and been living in Washington DC for eight years.
SA is an active and important member of Cities Alliance, says Cobbett, and he maintains regular contact with officials in the department of human settlements.
"SA's housing problems are far from unique, though its racial and spatial history heighten some of these challenges," says Cobbett. "There also continues to be the belief that government has the capacity to solve everything itself. Like most governments, it does not." He counts affordability - for affected communities and authorities - among SA's biggest obstacles to addressing the backlog of 2m houses. Spatial inefficiency, with the urban poor continually forced to the outer fringes of the city, continues to be a problem.
"There's also been a failure to mobilise non state resources to resolve the housing issue on a long-term basis, particularly those of the urban poor themselves," he says.
To achieve the kinds of scale necessary in SA and elsewhere, the poor need to be involved as the primary resource, and not merely viewed as beneficiaries. "All over the world, the poor produce better houses, faster, than the public sector," he says. "Rather than be seen as a problem, this should form the platform for housing policy."
Countries do not achieve middle-income status without urbanising and industrialising, yet governments and some development agencies have an ambiguous, even hostile, response to urbanisation, preferring to focus on rural poverty. "But urban growth and the reduction of rural and urban poverty are integrally linked." He points to Sao Paulo, Brazil, as having produced highly innovative responses to the problem of excluding the urban poor.
"In SA, attention and resources should be allocated for the release of well-located land for more integrated settlement patterns, with the explicit aim of breaking down patterns of social exclusion," he says. Cobbett says the repositioning of the department of housing to the department of human settlements is a positive signal.
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