Addressing the 2.2 million housing deficit in South Africa

South Africa has a housing supply backlog of at least 2.2 million units, with a significant shortage in the affordable housing or “gap market”, according to a recent study by the Centre for Affordable Housing Finance (CAHF).

The gap housing market is generally considered to be households earning too much to qualify for Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) housing but too little to obtain traditional bank-financed homes in the open market.

40% of consumers fall into the RDP housing category (household incomes below R3 500 per month), and the wealthiest 30% of households are well-served by the open housing market.

Massive demand

The gap market is the middle 30% of consumers where the supply of housing stock is extremely low and even declining despite massive demand. A market design error is to blame for this high demand going unmet. Adverse market design disincentivises the holders of capital to invest in affordable housing.

The biggest hurdle relates to the unnecessary prolix, cumbersome, and expensive processes that are associated with evictions and foreclosures. The cost of resetting the transaction (eviction or foreclosure) is prohibitive in South Africa and does not match market circumstances.

South Africa should adjust their regulatory environment to favour private sector investment and the expansion of supply. 

We need to reduce the transaction cost for the holders of capital to take their chances on consumers who are not acceptable risks in the unduly high tenure security environment. In this way, some people will move into the formal housing market and fall out again, and perhaps more than once in their lifetime. If we go through enough of these cycles eventually everyone will be housed.

This solution may sound slightly callous and counterintuitive to the casual listener. The alternative, retaining our restrictive policy environment, is even more callous and is currently barring people from ever getting the opportunity to enter the formal housing market. What use is being born free if you will never realise that constitutionally mandated right of access to adequate housing?

Unintended consequences

Another prevalent and reasonably fixable market design problem relates to government subsidies. The Department of Human Settlements has been offering the First Home Finance (FHF) subsidy, previously called FliSP to households in the gap housing market. It aims to subsidise affordable first-time home-ownership opportunities for households with income from R3 501 up to R22 000 per month. It is an inverse means-tested subsidy, meaning that the cash grant is lower the higher the household income becomes.

Millions of rands earmarked for this subsidy have remained unclaimed in the past and continue to remain unclaimed. This is not because people do not know about the incentive or do not desire it. The first challenge is the relative scarcity of gap housing stock, which is driven by poor demand due to incentives that are adverse to the deployment of capital in this segment, whether by landlords or home loan providers.

The subsidy design has unintended consequences resulting in market participants, such as estate agents, being unwilling to sell to subsidy recipients. Due to overzealous fraud prevention measures and perhaps also an unwillingness to integrate into the existing market infrastructure, the government has traditionally insisted that the registered title deed contains the name of the subsidy recipient before they release the subsidy amount.

This means that the subsidy portion is usually received months after the transfer, unlike all other funds in a property transaction which are secured by third-party payment functionaries such as banks or attorneys. This makes each property transfer involving a subsidy inordinately complex, and everyone involved prefers doing the same transaction with a consumer who does not rely on a subsidy. Usually, it’s the estate agent waiting for the subsidy payment to receive their commission, and that is simply an unacceptable adverse incentive if the government intends to have the subsidy reach its intended recipients.

Though recent developments seem to favour fixing the market design shortcomings of FHF, the administration of the subsidy remains positively byzantine. There is a national subsidy authority, that can approve and pay subsidies, and a separate subsidy authority for each of the provinces, each with a unique set of rules and procedures and a separate application procedure. This is a quagmire for lower-income consumers to navigate successfully, especially where those who rely on subsidies are already viewed negatively by market intermediaries such as estate agents and transferring attorneys.

It will take significant political capital to implement market design solutions that can solve the problems facing the gap housing market. If we do nothing it may even get worse, says Kriek, who fears that the current government may not have the ability to adequately diagnose the problem, and much less the political will to affect the necessary policy and regulatory changes.

However, if it could succeed, the job creation that could follow finding solutions to the problem of housing supply could go a long way toward achieving the job creation efforts of the government recently articulated in the President’s State of the Nation address to parliament.

* Kriek is the MD at Sentinel Homes.

** Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views of Independent Newspapers.

PERSONAL FINANCE