Mayor Hill-Lewis Address to Council: Municipal Planning By-law Amendments
26 June 2025
Madam Speaker,
One point two million of our fellow residents live in informal structures in Cape Town.
For those of us who did not grow up in townships, or in a backyard, it is hard to imagine what that means. To live with bitter cold and constant damp in winter, and scorching heat and constant threat of fire in summer. As a country, we should never be satisfied while so many millions of our brothers and sisters live like this.
Every time I visit with residents in our over 600 informal settlements in Cape Town, I feel deeply and urgently the pressure to do more.
This is why we talk so often of the urgent pressure to get our national economy growing. For nothing solves poverty like a job, and nothing gets people out of shacks and backyards as effectively as a job does.
But we also can’t wait for a faster growing economy. While that is undoubtedly the only sustainable long term solution, we also need a plan now.
And if we are honest, South Africa has no plan for how to get people out of shacks and backyarders. None.
Some will point to the government’s free housing programme, called Breaking New Ground. But we all know that the budgets for this programme are so small, and shrinking, that it cannot even begin to provide enough homes to keep up with current demand, let alone make a dent on the waiting list. In fact, waiting lists across South Africa are getting much longer.
Government should be honest with South Africans that state housing programmes are unlikely to ever deliver a free house for them. Budgets are simply too small, the need too vast. Only a lucky few thousand per year, those waiting the very longest, will get a totally free house, while hundreds of thousands remain on the list. It is important that the public understand that.
But while there is no plan in the rest of South Africa, in Cape Town we do have a plan.
We are here today to usher into law what I believe is the only workable plan in South Africa for reducing informality over time.
This is no exaggeration, colleagues.
The amendments to the Municipal Planning By-law that we will vote on today will do more than any other programme, in any city, to help many more people make the leap from informal housing to dignified, affordable homes.
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.
As always, private initiative does not wait for the state – it is always far ahead.
Now we are 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.
The challenge we face 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 a 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 the 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.
We are doing something else too.
For so long, property development has been an industry dominated by wealthy established developers who mainly develop in expensive suburbs. Nothing wrong with that, we welcome all investment and the thousands of new jobs they create.
But today we are also blowing open the property development industry for thousands of new entrants – new property developers in the townships and in so many other areas. May they flourish in the months and years ahead!
And we are also improving the ease of doing business with the City, by streamlining processes and making it easier to deliver new housing stock onto the market across the City.
This amendment also empowers communities, by greatly improving public participation in planning applications, and giving the City real teeth for the first time to stop illegal building work.
Speaker,
The future of housing delivery is not about the state trying to keep up with the demand for affordable housing in our cities. Instead, it is about enabling and assisting the private sector to meet housing market needs at scale.
And with this legislative change today we deliver on our commitment made to residents at the election that we would enable much more affordable housing across the city.
This enabling planning framework now takes its place alongside the other milestones of progress we’ve made in affordable housing and land release, including:
- • Hands-on support for micro-developers in the form of pre-approved building plans and development charges discounts from a new incentive fund.
• Releasing more land for affordable housing in this term of office so far than in the last ten years, with a pipeline of 12,000 well-located affordable housing units close to the CBD and other business districts across the city.
• Publishing “Land Discount Guidelines” for the first time in SA. These guidelines codify how city-owned land can be heavily discounted to maximise the number of social housing units that can be viably developed – a national first.
• And utility discounts for Social Housing developments on water, electricity, and property rates bills, another first.
I want to thank the public for their extensive engagement with the by-law amendments and our various housing reform programmes.
I must also extend a particular thanks to some of our critical partners who have lent their time and expertise to this Mayoral priority programme, including the Development Action Group (DAG), uMaStandi township property finance, and the Trust for Urban Housing Finance (TUHF).
We are very grateful today to be joined by representatives of these partner organisations, and I would like to acknowledge Nomfundo Molemohi of uMaStandi, Nahim Ramzan of TUHF, and DAG representatives Brian Bango and Kamogelo Shika.
We are filled with hope and optimism at what we will achieve together in years to come in enabling much more affordable housing at scale in our city.
Colleagues, I hope you are all as excited as I am at the enormous potential of this particular piece of legislation.
With one simple vote today we will kick the supply of affordable housing into a higher gear in Cape Town.
So let us all throw our weight behind this important reform and take Cape Town one more step closer to a City of Hope for all.
Thank you
Published by:
City of Cape Town, Media Office
