OPINION: Despite rising land and housing occupations in the past decade, the state has failed to address the root causes thereof, writes Aisha Hamdulay. TheCapeArgus
Recently, we have witnessed a number of illegal and violent evictions around the country.Despite rising land and housing occupations in the past decade, the state has failed to address the root causes thereof.
In 1994, despite white people making up less than 10% of the population, they unjustly acquired 87% of agricultural land. Black people - more than 75% of the population, only owned around 15% of land, located in the former homelands, which in many cases, was not even agriculturally viable . It avoids looking at how cities are governed, spatially planned, how land was obtained under apartheid and how it continues to be protected by the elite. It has failed to acknowledge the engineering of an urban property market which allowed for white buyers to digest the most well-located land at below market value, at the expense of black people, and that a large amount of that accumulated wealth and land still lays unaccounted for.
South Africa is no longer primarily an agrarian society. Some 65% of our population lives and works in urban areas - or seek work in urban areas, and this continues to increase . Scholars thus agree that land reform discourse overestimates the demand for land, which could be confused with a demand for urban housing.In our context, the provision of a well-located house, and/or land is arguably an equal or better capital asset in comparison to agricultural land. When half of our population lives below the poverty line, and the scarcity of work is only increasing, having no security of tenure pushes one deeper into poverty.
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