The City of Cape Town says it is “eagerly awaiting” Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana’s announcement that the Budget, set to be delivered on Wednesday, will increase funding for cities to deliver affordable housing, as metro officials believe was promised by President Cyril Ramaphosa in his State of the Nation address.

The national subsidy regime remains “extremely constrained” and acts as a handbrake to fast-tracking social rental housing developments, says Cape Town Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis.

“We recently passed guidelines to discount city land released for affordable housing, however, developers still battle to pull-off viable projects due to constrained subsidies.”

Hill-Lewis says Cape Town’s accelerated land release for its affordable housing programme means that the city’s projects now dominate the national pipeline of the Social Housing Regulatory Authority.

“But, this pipeline can only move as fast as the available subsidy funding. Putting more money behind subsidies will directly enable social housing companies to viably deliver thousands of affordable housing units in Cape Town over the next few years.

“Cape Town can immediately accelerate affordable housing construction across various projects for which we’ve already released land.

“This includes over 4 000 units in the inner city and an overall pipeline of 12 000 units in well-located parts of the metro.”

Hill-Lewis also calls for the Budget to not cut pro-poor grant-funding, and for Cape Town to get its fair and equitable share from the national fiscus based on updated census figures, which show that the metro is about to overtake Johannesburg as South Africa’s most populous city of nearly five-million residents.

“There is more than enough waste and excess that can be cut in national government, and we are absolutely opposed to any pro-poor grant funding cuts to provinces and municipalities.

“Cape Town has spent a minimum 99% of all grant funding since 2020 to upgrade informal settlements and provide a measure of free housing to the poorest.

“These conditional grants must be protected at all costs from the nationwide cuts seen in previous year,” notes Hill-Lewis.