Pretoria - As of December 1 Tshwane's "missing middle" will finally have their own place to call home as the Marabastad Townlands social housing project steams full on ahead.
Tshwane MMC of Housing and Human Settlements, Mpho Mehlape-Zimu said with the amount of progress on-site as well as the administrative process of selecting tenants well under way they remained confident that everything was on track with the project.
She said since the application period for the units began on September 20 and closed on October 1 they had received roughly 7 000 applications.
By September 28, a total of 590 people out of the 7 000 applications had already qualified, however, the MMC said the City was still conducting the screening and verification process.
The DA leadership in Tshwane had an on-site inspection of the Marabastad Townlands Social Housing project. here is a look inside one of the newly-built units. @CityTshwane #Housing #marabastad pic.twitter.com/rYJrpWKalT
Applicants though can expect to start receiving SMS notifications as of October 28 detailing whether they qualified for a unit or not.
"Government can work and we hope to have tenants moving in on December 1. We've got all the contractors on the ground, work is happening and if we want to make it happen it will."
The MMC was speaking during an on-site inspection at the project site in the City accompanied by the DA Federal Leader, John Steenhuisen, Tshwane Executive Mayor Randall Williams, as well as DA Gauteng Provincial Leader, Solly Msimanga.
Steenhuisen said the project model of densification around well-located urban land close to city centres in a bid to enable people to live, work and play in the same environment was something he believed should be rolled out across the country.
He said even though the intentions of some RDP developments were well intended, it then placed people in a position in which they had to spend anywhere from R80 to R100 per day just on transport costs getting to and from work opportunities.
"The days of building large scale RDP developments on the outskirts of towns are not the solution anymore because we need to bring people close to the work opportunities that the CBD brings."
"Densification around the urban core and making sure you have a variety of different types of units so you end up with a cross-subsidisation to remain financially viable is the wave of the future for cities in South Africa."
Steenhuisen said he believed this would address the housing crisis in the country and overcome the spatial inequality that continued to bedevil many cities due to the legacy of the apartheid system which relegated people to the outskirts of business centres.
Pretoria News