By Ronald Eglin

There is a growing recognition within various circles of government, from local, through provincial to national, that the present approach to settlement development, which emphasises the immediate provision of a Breaking New Ground House on a serviced stand with individual title, is not achieving its goal of housing everyone. As Richard Ballard, a senior lecturer in the school of Development Studies at the University of Kwazulu Natal, said in an article published in the Mercury, 29 October 2009, “In 2004, 23 percent of households in South Africa’s nine largest municipalities still did not have access to formal shelter. The most serious study to date, published this year, estimates that even if the housing budget is doubled, we would only overcome the backlog by 2030.”

Various municipalities, like eKhuruleni and Cape Town Metros, as well as provinces, like the Western Cape Province, are exploring additional settlement development approaches that adopt a more incremental approach.

This article makes three suggestions for how such an incremental settlement development approach could be structured and funded, that involves (1) establishing ‘incremental settlement development zones’, (2) creating a ‘basic settlement grant’ facility, and (3) ‘twinning’ larger development projects with these ‘incremental settlement development zones’.

National government should consider legislating that all municipalities must undertake feasibility studies to identify ‘incremental settlement development zones’ within which they will prepare land in such a way that people in need of land and housing can settle on this land in an organised manner and have access to basic levels of services and some form of tenure security (not necessarily individual ownership). Households will then be able to start building interim houses while those that qualify can wait for further subsidy support to build top structures and those that do not qualify can get on with the business of using their own resources to improve their homes.

In order for this to be realised some form of grant-making mechanism (for example, a ‘basic settlement grant’) would need to be available from which municipalities can access funds to:

• Conduct broad land identification planning exercises, where potential portions of land for such zones could be identified as part of broader municipal housing sector plans.

• Undertake more detailed feasibility studies of short-listed portions of land to see if these land portions are suitable for incremental settlement from a bulk services, land availability and environmental point of view.

• Implement a process of securing the rights to develop the land, for those portions of land that prove suitable, through either a council resolution, if the municipality owns the land, or through municipal purchase of the land or some form of land availability agreement with the land owner if the land is owned by someone other than the municipality.

• Develop more detailed plans for the provision of some form of interim tenure arrangement, basic services and basic facilities.

• Physically peg out plots on the ground, provide a basic level of services and issue basic tenure recognition certificates to households allocated to these plots.

Such a basic settlement grant-making system would need to be either coordinated across departments or (probably more appropriately) be available from a single source. The details of how such a grant will work needs to be negotiated by those most involved in settlement development, for example the Departments of Rural Development and Land Reform,  Human Settlements, or  Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs.

Incremental settlement zones, developed using basic settlement grants, will need on-going support from the state for them to be successfully upgraded and improved over time. There will need to be offices in these settlements and in the affected municipalities from where this upgrading coordination can take place. It is therefore not only an issue of having the necessary funds to pay for the capital expenditure involved in upgrading (which can come from programmes like the Upgrading of Informal Settlements Programme or the enhanced Peoples Housing Process), but it is also an issue of having the necessary funds for human resources to be available on an on-going basis to ensure that this upgrading and improvement takes place. At the moment the majority of municipalities do not have the resources for such offices and departments. If funds are not secured for this upgrading support and coordination role then many of these ‘incremental settlement zones’ could remain underdeveloped long into the future as no one drives their improvement.

The ‘Inclusionary Housing’ concept may provide an unexplored avenue for securing funds for this on-going upgrading and improvement. At the moment, inclusionary housing is viewed as a mechanism for government to compel developers of larger shopping complexes and golfing estates, etc.—as part of their development approval agreements—to provide, on a once-off basis, housing for low income housing development. This concept could be expanded in such a way that these higher income developments, could be ‘twinned’ with incremental settlement development zones, and be required to help subsidise on a monthly or annual basis the on-going running costs of local upgrading support offices within these zones.

From a Managed Land Settlement point of view, people in need of land and housing need to be supported to ‘place their stake in the ground’.   They need to be able to get a piece of land with basic services and tenure security and know that they are then on the road to future upgrading and improvement.