Gauteng’s housing challenge is no longer simply about building houses. It is about building communities, creating ownership and undoing the geography of exclusion.
By Tasneem Motara, MEC for Human Settlements, Gauteng
When we measure what the Gauteng Department of Human Settlements achieved in 2025/26, the most obvious place to begin is with the houses.
We built 7 976 homes against a target of 7 503.
That is a significant achievement, and one of which I am proud. But it is not the number that matters most to me.
Because a house is a structure. A home is something more.
A home is a house built on well-located land, close enough to employment opportunities, schools, healthcare and functioning public services. It is a place where a family can build a future with the security of knowing that the property legally belongs to them.
That is the distance between delivering a house and delivering dignity.
And that is where the real work of human settlements begins.
The 2025/26 Annual Report provides an honest account of how far Gauteng has travelled along that road — and, importantly, how much further we still have to go.
We committed to allocating 4 000 completed homes to approved beneficiaries. We allocated 5 445.
We planned to acquire 200 hectares of well-located land and secured almost 280 hectares.
Through First Home Finance, our target was to facilitate 30 subsidies for working households. We paid out 64, assisting families who earn too much to qualify for a full subsidy but often too little to access conventional home finance.
We also directed 38% of our budget towards priority development areas, exceeding our 33% target.
And where we had planned to deliver 31 serviced sites, we completed 139.
Those figures may appear technical on paper, but they tell a much bigger story.
Serviced land is where the next house begins.
So too are the 1 961 foundations, 1 596 wall plates and 1 565 roofs that were already in place at the end of the financial year. Under the rules, these cannot yet be counted as completed homes.
But they are the pipeline.
Our responsibility now is to turn that pipeline into houses — and those houses into homes that people can call their own.
Housing must break the geography of apartheid
There is an even bigger reason why the location and quality of our housing programme matter.
Gauteng continues to carry the physical legacy of apartheid spatial planning.
For generations, poor and black South Africans were pushed to the edges of our cities — away from jobs, schools, economic opportunity and quality public services. Too often, the policy response was simply to provide a roof and consider the job done.
We cannot reproduce that injustice in new developments.
A housing programme that places people far from opportunity is not transformation. It is the old inequality rebuilt in new brick and mortar.
That is why well-located land, greater densification and our Mega Projects are so important.
We want communities that are connected to the economic life of Gauteng — communities where people can live closer to opportunity rather than spending hours and significant portions of their incomes travelling to it.
Human settlements policy must therefore be about more than construction.
It must be about spatial justice, economic inclusion and dignity.
Accountability means confronting what did not work
But government must also be honest about where it fell short.
Our overall performance against the year’s plan was 69%.
That is not the standard I expect from this Department.
We did not achieve what we should have on title deed registration. There were shortcomings in aspects of hostel management, while the Rapid Land Release Programme did not deliver the results we needed.
We have reviewed that programme, confronted its shortcomings and taken the lessons from the experience. It is now being relaunched on a stronger footing.
Because accountability cannot mean celebrating successes while explaining away failures.
It means being prepared to confront both.
A key without a title deed is not full security
Few issues illustrate this better than title deeds.
A family can receive the keys to a house and still wait years for the document that legally establishes their ownership.
Without a title deed, a home cannot fully perform its role as an asset. The owner faces limitations when it comes to borrowing against the property, insuring it, transferring it or passing it on to the next generation.
There are often legitimate reasons for delays. Municipal approvals, rates clearances, processes at the Deeds Office and historic property disputes can all contribute.
But an explanation cannot become an excuse.
When different parts of government fail to move together, it is the resident who waits.
That is not acceptable.
Our focus must therefore be on improving coordination across the system and removing bottlenecks wherever we can. The person who has waited years for a home should not have to spend more years navigating government processes to secure proof that the home is legally theirs.
Clean governance must translate into delivery
The Department’s financial and governance performance provides a solid foundation.
We received an unqualified audit opinion from the Auditor-General for the fourth consecutive year and spent 97% of our R6-billion budget.
Those are important achievements.
But an unqualified audit opinion does not put a roof over someone’s head.
Good financial management is a prerequisite for effective government — it is not the end goal.
Our challenge now is to make our delivery as consistent as our bookkeeping.
That means better planning, stronger contract management, identifying troubled projects earlier and taking corrective action before delays become failures.
It also means ensuring that commitments are matched by consequences when they are not met.
The real measure of delivery
Behind every housing application is a person or family.
There is a parent waiting for a secure place to raise children. There is a young family trying to establish itself. There are elderly residents who have spent years waiting for security. There are working households who fall between the cracks of traditional subsidy and private finance.
These are not numbers on a spreadsheet.
They are Gauteng residents waiting for a fair opportunity to build their lives.
That is the pressure under which we work.
And it should be.
It should push us to build faster, plan better, allocate homes fairly and ensure that the people we serve receive not simply a set of keys, but a genuine foundation for a better future.
The 2025/26 Annual Report shows that we made meaningful progress.
But progress is not completion.
The keys are not the finish line.
The finish line is when a family has a home in a sustainable community, connected to opportunity, secure in its ownership and confident that the next generation can inherit more than just bricks and mortar.
That is the standard we must continue working towards.
And we are not there yet.
