THE OWNERSHIP REVOLUTION

Barely noticed, a profound revolution in home-ownership has taken place in South Africa. More than 5.6 million African households now own their homes, and the great majority of these are fully paid off. For every white household living in a dwelling which it owns and has paid off, there are more than seven African households in a similar position.

These figures emerge from Statistics South Africa’s 2007 Community Survey, key points of which are summarized in this edition of Fast Facts.

The figures are particularly significant given the fact that denying Africans home-ownership rights was a pillar of the apartheid system. White governments believed that allowing Africans to own property in the supposedly white cities would strengthen their claims upon the franchise. Freehold and other property rights inherited from the colonial era were extinguished, a trend not reversed until Prime Minister John Vorster recognised that secure tenure was necessary to establish a stable urban work force after the strikes by Africans in the early 1970s. The upheavals in Soweto in 1976 prompted business to endorse demands by African leaders for homeownership rights, which were conceded in the 1980s. The then government, which owned the houses in African townships, began selling them to their tenants.

The post-1994 government has handed over many houses for nothing, while the provision of ‘RDP’ houses by the State, the mobilization of the banking sector, the abolition of residential segregation, the rise of the black middle class, and the de-racialisation of the housing market have all added momentum to the rise of African homeownership.

Many of the homes owned are in informal settlements, and many are traditional. But almost 70% of all formal dwellings on separate stands were also owned by their occupants in 2007. This means that 5.15 million of the 7.39 million such formal dwellings were owned by their occupants. There were at the same time a total of 2.17 million coloured, Indian, and white formal dwellings on separate stands. If we assume that 90% of these were owned by their occupants, then the remainder of the owner-occupiers of formal houses were Africans. So 3.20 million formal houses on separate stands were owned by Africans, making up 62% of the total. This is of course lower than the 79% of the population made up of Africans. It needs also to be remembered that the value of houses owned by Africans is lower than the value of most other housing, that many are very small and poorly built, and that the absence of title deeds often impairs ownership rights.

Even so, the rise of African formal home-ownership from almost nonexistent beginnings is remarkable.

-John Kane-Berman