The sites and services approach: a partial solution to South Africa's urban housing shortage

Abstract

Racially discriminatory apartheid-era policies, population growth, and high unemployment have given South Africa a severe shortage of urban low-income housing. This thesis evaluates the sites and services approach as a means to reduce the housing shortage. The limited success of the new democratic government's efforts to provide the urban poor with formal low-income housing suggests that sites and services housing's reliance on self-help labor may reduce the housing shortage more effectively than formal housing. This study will assess the sites and services approach in terms of several basic factors. They include: government costs per housing unit, speed of construction, affordability for the poor, and the degree to which the method can produce a standard of housing that could be acceptable to the poor.