'We Can't Afford the Lifts, Let Alone the Rent': Joburg Residents Speak on the Housing Divide

The City of Johannesburg's housing directorate is deadlocked. On one side, officials backed by private developers are pushing a high-density, mixed-use high-rise strategy centred on the inner city and Sandton corridor. On the other, ward councillors from Soweto to Alexandra are demanding a return to subsidised low-rise housing on serviced land. Caught between them are roughly 300,000 households on the city's official housing waiting list — a backlog that has grown, not shrunk, since 2019.

The debate has sharpened this year after the Gauteng Department of Human Settlements allocated R2.1 billion in its February 2026 budget for urban housing, the largest single provincial housing allocation in six years. How that money gets spent — and who it actually helps — is now a live political fight inside the ANC-DA coalition that governs both the province and the city.

Life on the Waiting List

In Kliptown, Soweto, a community of informal structures along Nhlapo Street has been waiting for formalisation since 2011. Residents there describe a city that talks about smart buildings and transit-oriented development while they still share a single standpipe between twelve households. One woman who has lived there for fourteen years said she received a letter in 2023 telling her to register for the Breaking New Ground subsidy programme — and has heard nothing since. The subsidy, capped at R228,000 per unit under national guidelines, does not stretch to buy anything habitable in suburbs closer to employment, so most recipients end up on the urban fringe, far from the Rea Vaya bus routes or Metrorail lines that work.

In Hillbrow, the picture is different but not better. High-rise buildings like those along Pretoria Street and Claim Street have been occupied informally for decades, many managed by so-called hijacked building syndicates. The city's Inner City Regeneration Unit has identified more than 200 such buildings for intervention, but progress on formal affordable rental units has been slow. A single room in a semi-functioning high-rise on Edith Cavell Street was advertised in June 2026 for R3,200 a month — utilities excluded, security non-existent. For migrants from Zimbabwe and Mozambique who fill many of these rooms, that figure represents close to half a month's income from informal sector work.

What the Numbers Actually Show

Johannesburg's population crossed 6.1 million in the 2025 mid-year estimates released by Statistics South Africa. The city's own Spatial Development Framework, last updated in 2024, projects that 1.3 million new housing units will be needed by 2040. Current delivery — formal subsidised units built and handed over — ran at fewer than 4,000 units per year between 2022 and 2025, according to figures tabled at the Johannesburg City Council in March 2026. At that rate, the backlog does not close in any modelled scenario.

Advocates at Planact, the Johannesburg-based urban NGO that has worked in Alexandra and Diepsloot for decades, argue the high-rise debate misses the point entirely. The organisation's position, outlined in a submission to the city in April 2026, is that neither luxury-adjacent mixed-use towers nor greenfield subsidised housing on the East Rand periphery solves the affordability problem without a functioning public transport system and meaningful bulk infrastructure investment.

City officials have indicated that a new integrated housing framework document will go before the Mayoral Committee before the end of the third quarter of 2026. Ward committees in areas including Orange Farm, Diepkloof and Tembisa have been invited to submit public comment by 31 July. Residents in the affected communities say they have been invited to comment before — in 2018, in 2021, and again in 2023 — and that the documents disappear into the system without traceable outcome. The R2.1 billion is sitting. The list is still 300,000 households long. The meetings are being scheduled. For the people on Nhlapo Street, none of that feels like urgency.