Housing crisis: Millions still homeless in Lufhereng

With Gauteng’s housing backlog still on 1.2 million, the abandoned houses in Lufhereng on the outskirts of Soweto have become a potent symbol of the provincial government’s inability to solve a housing crisis which has escalated to embarrassing levels.

Despite widespread acknowledgment that the state lacks sufficient housing for its people, the Lufhereng Integrated Development construction has been left to decay while thousands of people around Gauteng are left homeless following evictions in Joburg and Marikana informal settlement in Pretoria, with some people even living in abandoned schools.

Residents in Soweto have been waiting for answers from the Gauteng department of human settlements and infrastructure development to at least explain what the plan would be for the Lufhereng “low-cost houses”, but neither the department, nor the city are willing to claim the project.

Lufhereng resident Solomon Majake said after renting a room in Soweto for more than 10 years – from Pimville to Naledi and currently at Lufhereng – he was “excited to see the project up and running because I believed it would help those who had been waiting for houses for decades”.

“We have been waiting maybe a little over five years to find out what the deal is with those houses. If you drive past them, you’ll see they are starting to be vandalised because there hasn’t been any movement for a long time.

“The people who are renting here have been willing to pay for those houses. The MEC for human settlements Lebogang Maile came here and promised they would finish and allocate them but dololo (nothing),” Majake said.

Illegal

Another resident, Philipine Time, said the houses were monitored by security guards against people who wanted to occupy them illegally.

“There are people who were willing to occupy those houses and pay for construction to continue,” he said. “There are many unhoused people in the area desperate for shelter.

We know people in Soweto who have left their homes and moved into Mabewana Primary School in Mapetla because they’re overcrowded.

“People have been waiting for houses for at least 27 years. We are definitely not getting any houses anytime soon.” In a series of tweets earlier this year, Maile said the department was “making interventions and can confirm the developer will be back on site on Monday [2 February 2023], and the 122 houses at varying stages in extension 3 will be completed by the first week of March 2023”.

He added: “For the remainder of this administration, we will be dedicating all our energies towards completing incomplete projects across the province, including the Lufhereng Integrated Development Project.

“The Lufhereng Integrated Development Project is one of our department’s flagship developments undertaken by the City of Joburg on our behalf, but failures of the DA-led administration brought the project to a halt.”

READ MORE: Gauteng’s bubbling housing crisis

Accountability

The City of Joburg did not respond to queries about the project by the time of going to print. Meanwhile, parliamentary liaison and stakeholder relations officer Aluwani Chokoe also weighed in on Twitter and said Maile visited Lufhereng in February, “and made a commitment and interventions to get the developer back on site after the City of Johannesburg put the project to a halt”.

She added: “By end of March, the developer had completed over 120 houses in varying stages in Extension 5.

“In this particular area, the department is awaiting budget from the National Treasury to complete bulk services and roads. This process is expected to be finalised between July and August.” When asked what happened to the initial budget allocated for the houses, Chokoe said “the issue of incomplete units was earmarked for Covid as TRUs [temporary residential units]”.

“However, the project was going to be compromised and funding has been allocated to complete the units, including infrastructure connections and will be handed over as RDP houses – now referred to as Breaking New Ground,” she said.

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– reitumetsem@citizen.co.za