SA Affordable Housing January / February 2017 // Issue: 62 | Page 30
NEWS
Creating Harmony in
Cape Town
The City of Cape Town and the Cape Town Community Housing
Company’s Harmony Village housing project in Mitchells Plain
has been lauded for its excellence in service delivery, quality and
efforts to bring dignity to lower-income families.
T
he Harmony Village project was named the best
institutional housing project in the country at the 2016
National Govan Mbeki Awards ceremony which took
place at the Durban International Convention Centre on
24 November 2016.
This project has enabled the provision of 850 homes to
residents where the household has a maximum monthly
income of R3 500. It is part of an institutional housing
programme which assists those who earn too much for fully
subsidised houses, but do not qualify for bank loans because
their income is too low.
This project is a tangible example of the shift in housing
provision that the City wishes to undertake over the next few
years, where far more focus will be placed on social and
institutional housing as a mechanism to drive greater
delivery. The City drives social and institutional housing
projects through its partners and these projects are usually
strongly community-driven. The aim is to increase this type
of housing in well-located areas across the metro over the
next decades mostly for residents who earn just more than
the threshold of being considered the most vulnerable in our
society.
Across the metro, the City has budgeted about
R230-million in the current financial year for social and
institutional housing projects.
“We are very proud of this recognition and I am especially
thankful that our officials and partners, who work so hard,
have been recognised for their excellence and willingness to
go above and beyond the call of duty to ensure that we move
towards creating more dignified environments for our lowerincome residents,” says City’s Mayoral Committee Member
for Human Settlements, Councillor Benedicta van Minnen.
“All of the projects which we submitted for consideration
illustrate in some way or another how the human settlements
environment is changing across the country. It shows that we
need to increasingly think out of the box to meet the extreme
need for housing and that we need to do so through stronger
partnerships,” adds Van Minnen.
The City is also very proud of its other category
frontrunners: the Scottsdene rental housing project, the
Langa hostel transformation project and the Bardale/Mfuleni
development. All of these projects emerged as winners in the
Provincial Govan Mbeki Awards, which took place earlier in
September.
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JANUARY - FEBRUARY 2017
AFFORDABLE
SA HOUSING
Harmony Village housing project in Mitchells Plain.
This project has enabled the provision of 850 homes to
residents where the household has a maximum monthly
income of R3 500.