Joburg's Housing Crisis: What Officials, Experts and Key Figures Are Actually Saying

Johannesburg needs roughly 300,000 additional housing units right now. That figure, cited repeatedly by the Gauteng Department of Human Settlements in its mid-year budget review tabled last month, has become the number everyone in city hall is arguing about — and nobody is disputing. What they disagree on is who is responsible, who is failing, and how much time is left before the pressure breaks into something worse.

The urgency is sharpened by two pressures hitting simultaneously. Migration into the city from Zimbabwe and Mozambique has kept the population of informal settlements in areas like Diepsloot and Ivory Park growing faster than any formal housing programme can absorb. At the same time, the ANC-DA coalition governing Gauteng is trying to demonstrate, ahead of the 2027 provincial elections, that it can actually deliver where previous administrations only promised. Housing has become the stress test for that coalition's credibility.

What the Numbers Show — and What They Don't

The City of Johannesburg's own Housing Directorate estimates that the average wait on the RDP housing list stretches beyond 15 years for applicants who registered before 2015. A one-bedroom rental in Soweto's Pimville section runs between R3,500 and R5,000 a month — affordable on paper, but functionally out of reach for households earning below the R7,500 minimum wage threshold in the city's informal economy. In Hillbrow, where building occupancy is dense and landlord accountability is minimal, residents in some blocks pay R2,200 a month for a room with no title deed and no lease.

The Johannesburg Social Housing Company, known as JOSHCO, currently manages around 7,500 units across the city. Critics within the Urban Land Institute's South Africa chapter argue that number should be three times higher by now, given the pipeline commitments made under the 2019 Spatial Development Framework. JOSHCO officials have pointed to financing constraints and Eskom grid connection delays — problems that load shedding reduction has only partially resolved — as the main bottlenecks slowing new developments in areas like Orange Farm and Lenasia South.

Comparisons with other cities are instructive, if uncomfortable. In Nairobi, the Kenyan government's ambitious affordable housing levy — a mandatory payroll deduction — generated political backlash but has produced over 40,000 units in two years under a structured public-private model. In London, where the housing crisis draws its own constant headlines, the Greater London Authority missed its 2025 target of 52,000 new affordable homes by approximately 30 percent. Johannesburg's planners are well aware of both examples. The lesson most cite is that subsidy-only models fail without mandatory inclusionary zoning — a policy instrument the City of Joburg adopted in principle in 2021 but has enforced inconsistently in practice.

Voices Shaping the Debate

The loudest friction right now is between city officials and civil society groups operating in the inner city. The Central Johannesburg Partnership, which works across the Braamfontein and Newtown precincts, has called publicly for the municipality to accelerate the conversion of underused commercial buildings into residential stock — a model that has had partial success in the former mining belt west of the M1 highway. The organisation argues that 200-plus vacant or semi-derelict buildings in the CBD corridor represent a faster path to units than greenfield development on the urban periphery.

On the other side, ward councillors in areas like Alexandra and Tembisa are pushing back against density-first arguments, saying that bulk infrastructure — water, sanitation, roads — in existing informal settlements has to come before new units are stacked onto systems already under strain.

What happens next depends largely on whether the Gauteng Human Settlements Department releases its Catalytic Projects pipeline review, expected before September 30. That document is supposed to list which of the 22 large-scale mixed-income developments approved since 2020 will actually receive budget allocations in the 2026/27 financial year. Housing NGOs, including Ndifuna Ukwazi's Joburg affiliate, have already indicated they will take legal steps if the review is delayed again. The clock, everyone agrees, has been running for a very long time.