Budget 25/26: Cape Town calls for more affordable housing funding for cities

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19-02-2025
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Cape Town Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis says the City can accelerate thousands of planned affordable rental apartments in well-located areas if the National Budget for 2025/26 includes President Cyril Ramaphosa’s SONA promise to improve state subsidy funding. The Mayor further called for no cuts to pro-poor grant-funding to municipalities and provinces. Read more below:

‘We are eagerly awaiting Finance Minister Godongwana’s confirmation that the Budget includes more funding for cities to deliver well-located affordable housing, as President Ramaphosa promised in SONA.

‘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. 

‘The national subsidy regime remains extremely constrained and is a handbrake to fast-tracking social rental housing developments. 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.

‘Our accelerated land release for affordable housing programme is ensuring that Cape Town based projects now dominate the national pipeline of the Social Housing Regulatory Authority (SHRA). 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,’ said Mayor Hill-Lewis.

The Mayor further called for no cuts to pro-poor grant-funding, and for Cape Town to get its fair equitable share from the national fiscus based on updated census figures showing the metro is about to overtake Johannesburg as SA’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 years,’ said Mayor Hill-Lewis.

The Mayor said the City is further hoping for the Budget to make good on a recent undertaking by the national government to re-commit funding to emergency housing provision in metros.

Aside from more subsidy funding, Mayor Hill-Lewis previously welcomed various housing reforms announced in the President’s SONA, including the intention to release more well-located land in metros. In Cape Town, the City has been calling for the release of national government-owned mega-properties, including several military bases and parts of the parliamentary village for affordable housing development.