Creating a gap that can be filled: Constructing and territorializing the affordable housing submarket in Gauteng, South Africa

Abstract

As the housing bubble burst in overheated property markets around the world, South Africa’s so-called ‘affordable housing market’ appeared to be bucking the trend. From 2010, affordable housing prices were rising and selling quickly, especially in Gauteng, Johannesburg’s city-region, chronically short of actually affordable housing and with a growing black middle class. Touted as ‘SA’s best-kept investment secret’, the affordable housing market offered a lifeline to the property industry and the potential to democratize segregated property markets. Yet, in practice, the tapping of South Africa’s lower-income housing market by capital has been a limited one, narrowly catering to particular subjects and spaces. Drawing on heterodox approaches to ‘actually existing markets’ and qualitative fieldwork conducted in Johannesburg between 2012 and 2013, this paper traces how the boundaries of the affordable housing and mortgage submarket are produced and shift through the investments of multiple communities with their own theories of housing markets and different interests in ‘making the market work’. Despite these investments and contestations, the submarket is narrowly territorialized within developer-driven housing largely in Gauteng for public-sector workers, to optimize the market within mortgage capital’s frameworks of risk, return, race and space. The South African mortgaged affordable housing submarket is not so much in need of market information or constitutive of a new frontier of global finance, as a territorial fix for domestic capital vis-à-vis development imperatives. To investigate struggles over this submarket, I draw together socio-institutional approaches to markets with critical political economy of housing markets and put them into conversation with critical development studies scholarship on markets. This combination allows us to make space for multiple projects of ‘improvement’ and profit in our analyses of market-making, as well as how these are shaped by, and shape, space and conjuncture. I seek to contribute to a growing literature on the geographies of markets from a Global South context where housing is framed as both a market good and constitutional right by examining a case of apparent ‘market failure’.

Spatial trends in Gauteng

“…• Post-apartheid entry-level suburbs, many of which are on the periphery (Butcher, 2020a(Butcher, , 2020b(Butcher, , 2016.…”

“…• Land cost. Affordable housing developers are pursuing remote developments because they can deliver entry-level housing at prices that lower-salaried workers can afford there (Butcher, 2020a). The location of government-led human settlements projects can also be dictated by the price of land.…”

Processes of Peripheralisation: Toehold and Aspirational Urbanisation in theGCR

“…Aspirational urbanisation began on land adjacent to former apartheid townships-like Soweto in the City of Johannesburg and Tembisa in Ekurhuleni-because of lower land values (Harrison and Harrison 2014) and people could be enticed to relocate from their nearby neighbourhood (Lemanski 2017;Mosselson 2018). Beverly Hills, established in the late 1980s in Soweto, was one of the first private developments to address the Black African consumer market, followed by Protea Glen on Soweto's outer margins in the early 1990s (Butcher 2016). Similar development began in the newly established municipality of Ekurhuleni in Kingsway and Alra Park in the late 1980s (Seekings 1990).…”

“…Windmill Park, a neighbourhood east of the large apartheid township of Vosloorus, began construction in the early 2000s (Butcher 2016). In the transitional phase before abolition of the Group Areas Act in 1990, local government ceased declaring areas for specific racial groups when granting permission to construct new neighbourhoods.…”

“…Aspirational urbanisation is thus the term selected for the process of people accepting the geographic peripheries, in order to realise their aspirations for a secure, middle‐class lifestyle (Cirolia 2016; Harrison and Harrison 2014:310). Today, it essentially functions as “a territorial fix for domestic capital vis‐à‐vis development imperatives” (Butcher 2020a:173)—both in the production of space as well as forms of social reproduction intertwined with the state, finance, and civil society (Ballard and Butcher 2020:273). Access to funding for the settlements resulting from aspirational urbanisation is dependent on job titles: nurse, teacher, public servant—another residual practice from apartheid (Platzky and Walker 1985).…”