Lee-Roy Chetty – Addressing the Housing Shortage in South Africa

Mail & Guardian. December 1, 2012. Access for the poor to urban land and housing is one of the main challenges facing policy makers in South Africa.
Estimates suggest that 26% of households in the six metropolitan areas in our country live in in-formal dwellings, often “illegally” and with limited access to services.
Movement from the informal to the formal sector is also low.
The growth of informal settlement in cities is often the upshot of unplanned urbanisation or lack of coordination. The concept of new urbanism emphasises coordination between long term land use, housing and transportation planning as an essential pillar for smart growth.
It recognises the importance of spatial or geographic proximity, layout and an integrated design of those uses.

Conversely, a lack of efficient integration can throttle sustainable development and eventually leads to an inferior growth path with suboptimal housing, educational, employment and service opportunities.

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