Rent control not only fails, it entrenches inequality

SA has so much land but people are struggling for houses. Old age homes are overpriced. Pensioners' homes are far too expensive.

It should be encouraged to build more housing, as looting money is so rife here. I'm a pensioner and can't find a pensioner place to live. How many more like me?

The population here has grown but the housing development has not grown. This is really unfortunate in SA, our beautiful country.

Please supply housing for all groups of age.

We don't want rent control. We want the City to curtail the ability of those who already have homes to hoard housing by taking out loans to buy existing properties to be repaid by others' labour, and pricing first-time home buyers out of the market.

The COCT rates payer database makes it very clear to what extent individuals (and the CCs they hide behind) own 3, 4, 5, 10, 20 properties. They need the living daylights taxed out of them at 3 times, 4 times ... 10 times, 20 times the rates until they are weaned off buy to let. Landlords are acceptable if they ADD to the housing stock by developing and renting out new builds.

Use the COCT data also to crack down on ghost properties by tracking negligible water and electricity consumption. Use it or lose it!

I don’t have a strong opinion on rent control. Whether rent control can be implemented intelligently, is open for debate, and I respect Hill-Lewis’s opposition to it. But what alarms me is his denial of the extent of the housing crisis.

The article only contains the word “crisis” to say that the current situation “is not a crisis”. Instead, the mayor uses words like “successful”, “thriving”, “appeal”, “desirable” – and once, the words “frustration” and “housing stress”. It looks as though Hill-Lewis sees the spiraling rentals as a negligible collateral damage resulting from successes. And since he wants to make Cape Town even more successful, we must brace ourselves for further pressures on the cost of housing.

Quantity over quality?

In Hill-Lewis’s view, the challenge is merely about balancing out a quantitative equation of supply and demand. Increasing supply is “the only solution”, he claims. Rather than the comprehensive strategy proposed by le Roux, Narain and Cogger, with multiple interventions to correct market imbalances, he prefers a mono-dimensional approach. As if his “build-more” strategy would magically address the qualitative side of the equation and deliver housing units in the required typology, density and location. There is ample evidence that it doesn’t.

Time to celebrate?

Yes, given the colossal supply gap in the under-serviced segments of the market, we need a radical change in gears in the housing system. So if Hill-Lewis’s focus on quantity could result in a genuine acceleration in the delivery of well-located housing in the type that most Capetonians need, including truly affordable as well as social housing, there would be plenty to celebrate.
But Hill-Lewis’s boasting about the accelerated release of land seems misplaced if it doesn’t result in housing being built and units being delivered. As the mayor of the country’s most expensive city, Hill-Lewis must mobilise his party to action all levers of the national unity government so that delivery is fast-tracked. Capetonians deserve nothing less.

The story Geordin Hill-Lewis tells of a city thriving, building, regenerating; of a city that is doing everything it can, a ‘successful city’, is not the one that I recognise.

His response raises deeper questions: for whom does this city truly function? For whom is the city a success?

Here is the reality: housing solutions in Cape Town are ineffective, and if the City continues to prioritise profit, consumerism, and individualism over black and brown lives, it will further entrench spatial apartheid.

Hill-Lewis has called spatial apartheid ‘propaganda language that is no longer rooted in reality.’ This rhetoric is dangerous and continues to obscure a violence of exclusion that is ever-present. During apartheid, the Group Areas Act forcibly removed hundreds of thousands of people from neighbourhoods now celebrated as charming, walkable, and desirable. Hill-Lewis speaks of inclusivity, but the reality is that apartheid spatial planning is very much alive, it is entrenched, and it is deepening.

A city whose past rests on economic disenfranchisement must build its future on economic redress. Instead, Cape Town prioritises tourism and investor interest over accessibility and inclusion. As black and brown communities are pushed to the peripheries of a city that has become increasingly unaffordable, the centre of the city has been transformed into a playground for digital nomads, tourists, and foreign investors. Neighbourhoods like Woodstock, Salt River, and Bo-Kaap are now sites of rapid gentrification.

South Africa is known to be one of the most unequal countries in the world, with stark divides between rich and poor – the Unequal Scenes project by Johnny Miller illustrates this clearly. (See: https://unequalscenes.com/cape-town)

Displacement in South Africa has always been engineered by design: if not by bulldozers, then by the quieter violence of economic policy. It is engineered down to everyday life, drawing invisible borders around who gets to experience the city’s pleasures, and who is consigned to its margins. Go to any of Clifton’s beaches, and you will not see predominantly black and coloured working-class people.

The sand and seas themselves are a landscape of exclusion. There are no guards or signs, just invisible gatekeepers of beauty – an enduring spectre of apartheid that maps out who belongs. It is no wonder that they call parts of Cape Town ‘little Tel-Aviv’. It is a settler-colony.

In colonial South Africa, taxation was used as a tool to uproot black families and funnel cheap labour into cities and mines. The hut tax was introduced in 1849 by the white colonial government. This meant that black people were required to pay the government, in cash, not cattle or crop, a certain amount for every person in their family who lived in a home.

Failure to pay this tax would result in serious consequences: cattle or crops were seized, and huts were burned down, leading to displacement and homelessness. A primary goal of this tax was to create a cheap labour supply for Europeans. To meet these obligations, many black people were compelled to become migrant labourers in the mines, accelerating the displacement of black people from the land.

Cape Town’s geography compounds the exclusion. Commuters from the Cape Flats spend hours on the road each day, while inner-city life becomes increasingly inaccessible. Workers of the city perform an invisible labour, arriving at daybreak and leaving in the afternoon.

The open letter by Ndifuna Ukwazi and Equal Education, addressed to Hill-Lewis on his comment about spatial apartheid, draws attention to the fact that 40% of income is used on transport for those on the outskirts. Unhoused people occupying pavements are routinely harassed and removed by law enforcement and private security companies like the Red Ants. Often, the city invokes the language of legality - “public order” and “public safety” - while relying on the same logic that justified apartheid removals: certain people do not belong in certain spaces.

Within the city’s urban fabric, consumerism and tourism have become major aspects of the urban political economy, shaping the texture of a landscape and how we relate to one another. Artisanal marketplaces proliferate; a ‘pacification by cappucino’, as urban sociologist Shaaron Zukin puts it.

Cape Town does not need another matcha store.

Golden Acre - one of the most iconic public spaces in the CBD – was sold to a private company, Puritex in February 2025, to build affordable housing. The developer promises “414 affordable units,” yet the income threshold to qualify is R32 000 per month. This is higher than the original proposed R22 000, at the insistence of the City.

Cissie Gool House, an old Woodstock hospital occupied from 2017 by around 800 people facing evictions, has recently been approved for sale on the open market. It will be turned into affordable housing units operating on an income threshold of R32 000.

The national minimum wage in South Africa translates to around R4 744 per month for a full-time worker. The median salary in the Western Cape in 2025 is around R15 500, higher than the national average due to factors like cost of living. This is still less than half of the R32 000 threshold in this case.

Regarding free housing delivery, none of this has been included in this plan. The RDP project, later rebranded as the Breaking New Ground Project (BNG), faced an 82% decline in delivery in 2024 since its peak in 1998/1999. The social housing backlog is decades-long, and housing developments are slow. According to the city’s housing needs register, as of September 2024, 412 073 applicants had registered their need for housing, though this likely does not capture the full need.

InsideAirbnb records that Cape Town has more 26 484 listings - more than double popular tourist destinations like Barcelona or Amsterdam. The Rent Collective made suggestions on stronger regulations of short-term rentals, but Hill-Lewis – while denying their impact on the housing crisis - did not engage them in any detail. The revolving door between politics and private business can also blur lines between public interest and private profit. For example, Gwen Ngwenya, formerly Head of Policy for the DA, moved directly into a senior policy role at Airbnb Middle East & Africa. Airbnb remains largely unregulated despite its massive impact on local housing supply.

A property tax, which is a compulsory levy on land and buildings imposed by the government, could redistribute resources as it requires wealthy landowners to contribute towards public services and goods for lower-income communities.

This could be a viable solution in addressing spatial inequality, funding affordable housing, and enhancing social infrastructure. By linking property wealth to public investment, the city could begin to transform historically exclusive spaces into shared, accessible urban environments, ensuring that economic privilege no longer determines who can fully participate in the life of the city.

Cape Town today bears a striking, albeit unsurprising, resemblance to Fanon’s words. A city of mountainside villas and sea-facing penthouses, and a city of endless commutes via taxis, backyard dwellings, and overcrowded townships. It is a city that will remain divided by history and maintained by neoliberal policies.

Dignity should not have to come at the cost of violence. But it will, as long as the city chooses investors over residents, tourists over communities, and profit over poor lives. If Cape Town truly wants to be a world-class city, it must first be a city for the people who built it, for the workers who run it, who were displaced from it, and who deserve to return - not as outsiders, or temporary visitors who work there, but as rightful inhabitants.