Cape Town’s City Council has approved a number of changes to the Municipal Planning By-law (MPBL) in a move it believes will make it easier to develop and build affordable housing, especially in backyards in lower-income areas.

The amendments should also allow the city to secure its share in terms of property tax and income from utilities.

According to the city the revised MPBL include the following:

• ⁠Single Residential Zoning is renamed Residential Zoning (R1), and provides for additional use rights in low- to medium-density residential neighbourhoods. 

Additional use rights for R1 including affordable rental flats, supplementary dwelling units and places of instruction. These are subject to certain conditions.

An ‘affordable rental flat’ is a new additional use right on properties as per an approved map.

The number of small-scale affordable rental units on a single property may not exceed eight units, plus a dwelling house, or 12 units if there is no dwelling house on the land.

•⁠  ⁠Incentive overlay zonings (IOZs) aim to make it easier and more cost-effective to develop property in the focus areas of Athlone, Maitland, Parow/Elsies River, Bellville and Diep River. The IOZs assign additional and enhanced development rights to properties that fall within certain areas in these overlay zonings.

•⁠  ⁠Amendments under Section 111 allow the city to use email as the method of contacting and notifying interested and affected parties. Parties must provide the city with their email addresses, and update these regularly. A person who does not have access to email may apply for notification by other means.

If a resident already has their latest email address with the city, they do not have to update it again.

Cape Town Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis says the new land-use right to build affordable rental units in identified neighbourhoods with highest demand will enable more people to make the leap from informal housing “to dignified affordable rental units”.

“These by-law changes will support and enable micro-developers to deliver affordable housing in townships, informal and lower-income suburbs at a far faster rate.

“I believe this is the only workable plan in South Africa for reducing informality over time.”

Hill-Lewis notes that State housing programmes are unlikely to ever meet the housing requirements of the poor.

“Budgets are simply too small, the need too vast…The fact is that micro-developers in lower-income communities are already getting on with meeting housing demand by building many thousands more units every year than the State could ever possibly hope to deliver.

“Now [the City of Cape Town is] playing our proper role – not standing in the way, but enabling this form of housing delivery, driven by people's own enterprise, ingenuity and investment.

“And we are enabling homeowners in lower-income areas to put their property assets to productive use to generate vital income.”

Hill-Lewis adds that the challenge is that much of this building work currently happens outside of the legal planning framework.

“This housing should be delivered safely, compliantly and lawfully. And we should be able to derive future property rates revenue from these properties so that we can fund more infrastructure and services in these communities.

“For these reasons, the amended by-law introduces the new land-use right to build affordable rental units in 194 neighbourhoods in our city with highest demand.

“These areas are mostly informal and lower-income suburbs which have, over the past decade or so, experienced very rapid densification in the form of backyarder dwellings and other informal structures.

“By introducing this additional land-use, the city will be better able to regularise and regulate these developments to ensure compliance with national building regulations so that the units can be of a better quality, safer and, importantly, legally connected to services like water, sanitation and electricity.

“Of course, affordable housing can be built anywhere in Cape Town – the enabling laws already exist for this – but what this amendment proactively does is incentivise lawful, compliant and safe building practices in our fastest-growing lower-income communities where achieving this is particularly challenging,” explains Hill-Lewis.

The amended by-law will run alongside other measures under the Mayoral Priority Programme for affordable housing and land release.

These include support for micro property developers in the form of pre-approved building plans and development charge discounts from a new incentive fund; the release of more land for affordable housing, with a targeted pipeline of 12 000 affordable housing units close to the central business district and other parts of the metro; the publication of land discount guidelines which allow city-owned land to be discounted in order to maximise the number of social housing units that can be developed; as well as the provision of utility discounts for social housing developments in terms of water, electricity and property rates bills.

Illegal Building Work Remedy
A further by-law amendment gives the City of Cape Town immediate recourse in situations where developers continue with illegal construction, despite an order to stop work.

Often developers opt to continue building as they are willing to pay the fines.

Given the fact that these matters take considerable time to be concluded in court, the surrounding communities are often impacted while the city seeks legal recourse.

“This new addition not only allows the city to impound the developer’s movable property, but also that of the property owner and contractor involved in the illegal work,” says Deputy Mayor Eddie Andrews.

“This is to close any loopholes. By adding this provision we trust that those who ignore the MPBL and notices issued in terms of the National Building Regulations and Building Standards Act will think twice before doing so.”

This latest review of the MPBL formed part of a five-year review process which took into account policies and strategies adopted by city council since the last review in 2019.