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Newsmaker Yes, Minister of Housing Lindiwe Sisulu

 I am as much a minister of high-, high-end property as I am of low-end property. I want them – the developers – to thrive so that they can continue with their work. That will benefit me and assist with the enormous backlog that government has.’ Say what you like about Minister of Housing Lindiwe Sisulu, her stringent academic background means she lays the issues out well, and argues them very persuasively.
The issue at the moment is a new government objective that seeks to compel all developers to include a 20 per cent low-income housing component in their new developments. There has been grumbling and groaning from some industry players, and a few headlines that got homeowners in a froth.

‘She wants to put a location down the road! What will happen to the value of my property?!’ squawk some residents.
Actually, the minister doesn’t want to do that. The entire concept around low-income housing components has been closely planned for over 18 months with industry stakeholders, including Sapoa and advisor Prof Dan Smit (involved in development for 30 years and former professor of Architecture and Allied Disciplines at the University of KwaZulu-Natal), who looked at similar international successes in Malaysia, Ireland and the UK.

Sisulu is a believer in the social contract, and hers with the construction industry goes something like this: ‘I went to them and listened to their problems. They told me how long it takes to get permission to build, how long it takes to get bulk infrastructure. The developers have been telling me that it sometimes takes up to three years to get a permit to rezone and confirm a housing development. I listened to them talk about the delays and the blockages in the system, exacerbated by the fact that the capacity we have at local-government level isn’t always what it should be.’

She rose to the challenge. ‘I told them I would do something about this. I would free up government land already zoned for housing – which would save the developers time and money – if they would, in return, assist me by putting a fraction of that money they have now saved into dealing with our massive backlog. And they said: “If we save money, we would be only too happy to plough some of it back into our community.”
‘I didn’t,’ she emphasises, a half-smile forming as she thinks about some of the scaremongering stories, ‘take them by the scruff of the neck and say: “You WILL do this!” We probably have not communicated this as well as we should have but there’s a perception that “this minister wants to build a low-income house right on my doorstep and what will happen to the value of my home” and they tear their hair out. And today I’m having a very bad hair day so I can imagine what they must look like!’

But there’s a serious message behind the joke. Sisulu says she wouldn’t cut off her nose to spite her face by devaluing house prices. ‘The value of the assets that I’m giving the poor in the shape of low-income houses will be determined by the value of the assets the rich hold. The value of the asset I’m giving will be determined in a market where house prices are very high. So it’s important to me that I maintain house prices. This is what makes property economics work.’

She is definitely looking for a win-win situation all-round. She cites the example of St Francis Bay: if developers in the past had put a fifth of their profits back into low-income housing, an informal settlement – ‘a blot on that beautiful landscape’ – probably wouldn’t have sprung up at the entrance to the Eastern Cape beach resort. ‘Somebody has to clean those beautiful houses. Somebody has to keep the garden. Somebody has to be the nightwatchman. And somebody has to work in the hotels and restaurants. And all these people have to live somewhere. And you know where they live?’ In a pretty grim informal settlement on the town’s outskirts, of course. Sisulu continues: ‘The thing about creating an informal settlement right on your doorstep is that you will never be able to fight criminality. The police are unable to police an informal settlement. People live in a world that has no street names, no addresses. They are out of reach.’

But people without formal housing can’t be ‘out of sight, out of mind’ either. ‘The government has to spend R7-billion a year subsidising transport because people were made to live in some barren, God-forgotten land kilometres and kilometres away from the centre of the economy.’ Imagine if that R7-billion could be spent on housing…
But the minister interjects: ‘Look at Cosmo City to the north of Joburg. They said it wouldn’t work. We built houses at R500 000 alongside an area where there aren’t such houses.

‘The bottom line is we wouldn’t politically, ethically or aesthetically put a low-income house right next to a high-income house. The basis of our policy is to create communities. All people want to form a community of their own but not miles away from the source of jobs, social and cultural amenities and other communities, which renders each community very vulnerable to the other. In Brazil they call it the politics of exclusion. If a community has no affinity with another, in a few years’ time members of the one will have no problem breaking into the houses of the other.’ She makes a good point.

So if we’re all agreed that low-income housing near transport nodes and jobs is a good thing, do the houses have to be so soulless? Once again Sisulu is passionate. ‘I can’t get into the design debate because design depends on available materials, the level of maintenance those materials require and sustainability. But I can say that it will be “illegal” to build a new house without some greenery, otherwise it just will replicate the Cape Flats – a brick jungle that destroys people’s souls. I believe in green issues and it’s a case of “one house, one tree” from now on. Lawns, trees and playing areas are expensive but, together with the Environmental MECs, we insist on them in new developments.’
But although some greenery is relatively easily achieved, other environmentally-friendly measures are trickier to tackle. ‘I would love to make solar panels a prerequisite but the costs are astronomical. If I stood up in parliament and included the cost of solar panels in the building costs of new houses, the headlines would run for a week! That’s because we, and politicians especially, think in the short-term. We must train ourselves to think of the future.’

Speaking of the future, how does Sisulu see the future of the real estate industry, which is still largely white and relatively informal? ‘What a lot of people don’t realise,’ she explains patiently, ‘is that the Estate Agents Affairs Board historically falls under the Department of Trade and Industry, not Housing. I want to take it over but it’s taking a long time to make the transition.’
She agrees that blacks and whites have different approaches to the market, and that it can be very difficult for rookie black agents to penetrate an industry that relies so heavily on networks that they’re not necessarily part of. ‘Blacks often simply do not want to sell their houses. If they buy a house outside the township, they will get rural relatives to live in the township family house when they move out. So what you find are thousands and thousands of “dead assets” or “hidden assets” – houses that haven’t been converted into capital. And because of this inclination not to sell, to hold onto their houses, there isn’t a lot of available stock in black areas where black agents operate. In that segment of affordability for most black families – around R500 000 – there simply is no stock!’ So it’s often a double whammy for black agents wanting to crack the real-estate ceiling.

It’s clear that resolving the housing crisis in the country is in every South African’s best interest. So how can you and I, average tax-paying citizens who might not have enormous amounts of time or money on our hands, help the minister? She doesn’t hesitate for a second. ‘If you employ workers, cleaners, a receptionist, your tea lady, find out if they qualify for a state grant. Find out if they’ve put their name down a government waiting list. Help them download forms off the Internet and fill them in. Sometimes these can be very daunting. Make a phone call to follow up once all the documentation has been submitted. Make it a joint venture between yourself and your employees to get them a house. The banks will grant bonds to those who earn R3 000 a month – if you can afford to pay that, then you will be assisting that person to get finance. You can even pay a portion of their salary straight to the bank to cover their bond. Banks are often reluctant to take such people on as they have high risk profiles but this is one way of solving that. If everyone assists in getting a family into a decent house where they can live with dignity and in stability, then we will create a country in which we will want to bring up our children.’ It sounds too good to be true but Minister Sisulu is far too bright to fall for jingoism. She wouldn’t say it if she didn’t think it possible.

Besides, her passion and savvy for industry come through loud and clear. ‘I could talk about property all day long,’ she reveals. ‘Did you know – because I didn’t until quite recently – that my dad was one of the first black estate agents?’ When Walter Sisulu was a young man in Joburg before the Second World War, he worked a string of jobs: as a labourer, in a diary, at the mines, in a bakery, in factories and as an advertising agent. Eventually, after studying at night school, he went into business and set up a small real estate agency that helped blacks buy and sell property before the apartheid government limited those rights.
Lindiwe Sisulu has political will and the property industry in her blood. ‘You know,’ she says only half-jokingly and a little wistfully, ‘in my next life I want to be an estate agent…’