'We Just Want a Roof': Joburg Residents Speak Out as City Tries Unorthodox Fix for Housing Crisis

The City of Johannesburg's housing waitlist currently holds roughly 300,000 names. That number has barely moved in three years. For the families behind it — crammed into back-room rentals in Turffontein, sleeping six to a shack in Diepsloot, or occupying condemned buildings along Berea Road — the policy debates happening inside the Metro Centre on Loveday Street feel very far away.

Yet those debates are shifting. Facing pressure from both ANC and DA councillors inside the Gauteng coalition government, the Joburg Housing Development Agency quietly piloted three so-called "inclusionary zoning" projects in late 2025, requiring private developers in Sandton and Rosebank to reserve at least 20 percent of new residential units for affordable rental at below-market rates. The results are modest, contested, and — depending on who you talk to — either a breakthrough or a Band-Aid.

What Officials Are Trying, and Why It Hasn't Been Enough

The inclusionary zoning push draws loose inspiration from cities like Singapore, where state-managed Housing Development Board flats house more than 80 percent of the population, and Toronto, where mandatory affordable set-asides have been part of planning law since 2007. But Johannesburg's context is fundamentally different. The city absorbs an estimated 40,000 to 50,000 migrants annually from Zimbabwe, Mozambique, and other parts of the continent, most of them settling first in the inner-city neighbourhoods of Hillbrow, Yeoville, and Jeppestown. Public land is scarce. Municipal finances are stretched. And unlike Singapore, Johannesburg cannot simply build on reclaimed coastal ground or command private capital with the authority of a developmental state.

The Joburg Housing Development Agency, working alongside the non-profit Johannesburg Social Housing Company (JOSHCO), has also accelerated a social housing programme in the Watt Street precinct in Newtown and in parts of Roodepoort. JOSHCO units rent for between R2,200 and R4,500 per month — well below the R7,500 to R12,000 that a similar-sized apartment commands in the private market in Braamfontein. But supply remains the problem. JOSHCO manages roughly 8,000 units citywide. The gap between that figure and the 300,000-name waitlist tells its own story.

Residents on the ground are less interested in the comparative urban planning literature than in whether the taps work and the lights stay on. Load shedding reductions over the past 18 months have helped — fewer people abandoning buildings because diesel generators failed — but water pressure in the inner city, particularly north of the M1 highway around Bertrams and Judith's Paarl, remains unreliable. A 47-year-old woman who has lived in a Bertrams back-room since 2019, paying R1,800 a month for a space with no private bathroom, said she registered on the housing waitlist in 2021 and has received one letter of acknowledgement. Nothing since.

The Unconventional Experiments Getting Attention

Alongside the formal programmes, a handful of smaller, community-driven approaches are drawing notice. The Inner City Resource Centre, based on Rissik Street, has been facilitating "co-operative housing" arrangements in which groups of tenants collectively lease large Hillbrow buildings, share maintenance costs, and negotiate directly with landlords — bypassing the single-room rental model that has long dominated the area. About 340 households across four buildings were part of the scheme as of March 2026, according to the Centre's own data.

Separately, a private developer consortium announced in June 2026 plans to convert two defunct office towers on Commissioner Street in the CBD into mixed-income residential units by the fourth quarter of 2027. The project, valued at approximately R480 million, would deliver around 620 units, with 140 earmarked for subsidised rental. Councillors on the City's human settlements committee have welcomed the announcement but noted that planning approval has not yet been granted.

For families waiting, the practical advice from housing advocates at Lawyers for Human Rights and the Inner City Resource Centre is consistent: register formally with the City's housing database at the Metro Centre, keep documentation updated annually, and engage ward councillors directly when applications go unanswered for more than 24 months — a threshold that, legally, triggers a review obligation. None of that makes the wait shorter. But it keeps an application alive, which, for 300,000 households in this city, is where things currently stand.