ABSTRACT
Although apartheid has been dismantled, its negative legacy, particularly of housing urban poor people remains a challenge. Emerging out of a highly skewed apartheid system characterised by poverty and discrimination, most of South Africa’s urban poor households are yet to witness improved service delivery, especially in the housing sector. At the centre of the housing debacle is access to land, which seems to defy all odds, to tame the galloping crisis of the housing needs in urban environments. It is from this perspective that this chapter revisits the housing challenges in South Africa’s post-apartheid period by examining the extent to which a lack of access to land remains a hindrance to decent housing among urban poor people. With its focus on Durban, the chapter uses empirical data obtained through qualitative and quantitative research tools such as mapping, interviews and observation. In addition, the chapter engages neo-liberal principles in a bid to explore the extent to which they explain the contemporary land–housing matrix and the resultant impact on housing urban poor people. The findings from this study show that prevailing land ownership patterns coupled with municipal land delivery systems, which are at variance with the expectations of urban poor people, are among the factors that are aggravating the housing problem. While not oblivious to the complexity of forces at play in expediting the release of land for housing urban poor people, the chapter recommends that meaningful change in urban land delivery systems requires both political will and a positive attitude among all stakeholders.
