Cape Town - Land Party members elected to Parliament after May 8 will have to donate at least 10% of their monthly salaries towards building houses for the most needy.
The party’s national spokesperson, Mandy Owens, said this was how serious the party viewed the crisis.
The Land Party, the ANC and the DA have shared their sentiments on how they will address the housing backlog in the Western Cape.
Owens said: “The housing lists in the Western Cape are in a shambles, so we plan to work from the ground with the people to create realistic and priority-based lists that meet the people’s need. We plan to empower people and local service providers with tools, materials, skills training and building plans to build their own homes to speed up the process. The Land Party will develop social rentals to provide affordable and accessible accommodation to the working class, in close proximity to work hubs.”
Human Settlements MEC Bonginkosi Madikizela said the backlog of people waiting for houses on February 28 was 540779, of which 70177 indicated they were backyard dwellers.
During his budget vote speech last month, Bonginkosi indicated that in 1994 the national housing backlog was estimated at 1.5 million households. Since then, nearly 5 million houses had been built and the current backlog was estimated at 2.2million.
ANC Western Cape spokesperson Dennis Cruywagen said: “We have to build houses because this is a crisis that can explode. We have backyarders, people in informal settlements and other residents desperate for housing. We can’t ignore them, as the DA has done. We will also have to peruse the housing waiting list to see if it is accurate, because we don’t want to allocate houses to people who are said to have leapfrogged waiting lists. We will end apartheid spatial planning and integrate our towns, and build more flats and housing schemes closer to cities.”
The DA’s provincial campaign spokesperson, Daylin Mitchell, emphasised the party had made housing a key element of its plan for the next five years. He highlighted a key initiative, the home voucher scheme, which people could use for buying, building and upgrading homes.
“We will fight to have large tracts of national government-owned land released to us for housing. This land has the potential to provide more than 93000 units within the City of Cape Town. The DA-run City of Cape Town is allocating more than R2billion to informal housing in the next five years, as
well as R4bn for upgrading informal settlements.”
@TheCapeArgus