Temporary Relocation Areas: an inappropriate response to a serious housing crisis

26 Feb 2025 | By Malcom Keswell
HRC Panel
26 Feb 2025 | By Malcom Keswell

 1. The global crisis of slum settlements

Combatting slum-like living conditions is one of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG 11.1.1). UN-Habitat estimates that over a billion people worldwide live in slums. This number amounts to about 24% of the global urban population. The figure below shows that South Africa matches this at 24.94%. This contrasts quite sharply with the progress seen in say Brazil, where the urban slum proportion has virtually halved in 10 years (2004 to 2014) to 14.90%. On the other hand Mexico’s situation is similar to South Africa’s, partly due to its rural land certification programme which led to increased population pressure on its cities [1]. But in contrast to Mexico’s successful rural land reforms, Peru’s failed land reforms and guerrilla conflict resulted in close to half the urban population living in slums by 2000, improving to 34.5% as of 2014. Many developing countries, including Indonesia, China, Brazil, Thailand, Kenya, Nigeria and India have chosen to address the the growth of slum settlements by providing formal, low-income housing on the peripheries of cities [2].

Proportion of urban population living in slums

Source: Global SDG Database (SDG 11.1.1; Proportion of Urban population living in slums, informal settlements or inadequate housing). Estimates are as of 2014. Estimate for South Africa 2020 is 24.2%

The Moving to Opportunity (MTO) experiment, implemented in the mid 1990s in six major cities in the USA, has served as a model for why rental subsidies might be effective. This programme subsidised the housing of low-income families if they moved to low-poverty neighbourhoods. Designed as a randomised controlled trial, recent work shows the programme had significant physical and mental health impacts [3], and strong impacts for the adult children of recipient households, particularly children that were pre-adolescents when their families took the opportunity to move [4, 5]. However, the programme did not produce significant employment or labour supply impacts [6]. The underlying mechanisms at work here – subsiding the movement of the very poor to better housing – comes at the cost of increasing the distance between the new housing opportunities and where the majority of jobs are to be found.

The closest developing country version of an MTO-like intervention, implemented in the city of Ahmedabad, in the state of Gujarat in India, had no impacts on tenure security, family income, or human capital, and negative impacts on social networks, and use of informal insurance [2]. Fully subsidised housing, such as the RDP and BNG programmes in South Africa, with even higher levels of spatial dislocation to employment, does not alter economic opportunities either [7]. While there are only a handful of rigorous evaluations of social housing interventions in South Africa, the evidence points in the same direction: negative or zero impacts on labour supply [8].

2. South Africa’s double-whammy: Temporary Relocation Areas

The Emergency Housing Programme (EHP) was established under section 3(4)(g) of the Housing Act to provide temporary relief – land, basic services, and shelter – when emergencies such as extreme weather events arise. Chapter 12 of the National Housing Code empowers municipalities to relocate people to emergency housing camps. In the Western Cape, these camps are known as Temporary Relocation Areas (TRAs).

The current use of TRAs is hotly contested and controversial. Although their establishment is legal, they are now applied to non-disaster situations. In particular, they are used to house people that are evicted from land earmarked for social housing. This type of repurposing of TRAs has been argued to be potentially unconstitutional [9]. Regardless of the legal implications, most of the well known examples of TRAs seem to resemble slums within slums. When evictees are relocated to a TRA, the intervention effectively amounts to moving the homeless to temporary housing on the peripheries, worsening their already dire living conditions.

Against this backdrop, the South African Human Rights Commission recently organised a day-long public engagement between key Chapter 9 Constitutional Bodies, the municipalities of the Western Cape, and academics from the University of Cape Town. The UCT delegation was led by SALDRU associate Malcolm Keswell, who was joined by Mercy Brown-Luthango and Nobukhosi Ngwenya, both from the African Centre for Cities, Jonty Cogger from the Law Faculty, and Suraya Scheba from the Department of Environmental and Geographic Science. Our mandate was to present an overview of the challenges experienced with TRA implementation and maintenance and to offer guidance on developing evidence-based interventions to better address the housing crisis in the province.

3. Examples of interventions to improve conditions in TRAs

There is an emerging body of international evidence of on-site slum dwelling upgrades that have demonstrated impacts for quality of life and child health [10, 11]. However, there is little to no evidence that these upgrades alter economic opportunities in any meaningful way. Given the sharp drop in the urban slum proportion in Brazil since 2004, and the dire situation that confronted the Peruvian government since roughly the same time, our inputs to the Commission sought to offer lessons from these two countries in how they have tried to address the problem.

3.1 Land registers and titling in Peru

By 2000, virtually half of Peru’s urban population lived in marginal squatter settlements in peri-urban areas and untitled inner-city neighbourhoods. In 1996, the Peruvian government enacted legislative and administrative reforms that mandated the Committee for the Formalization of Private Property (COFOPRI) to begin issuing and registering property titles into a newly created national registry. Over two-month periods, project teams moved from one area to the next and digitally mapped all lots in each city’s informal settlements, each involving 30000 to 35000 plots. It took five to seven weeks in each area to first establish claims and delineate properties before titles could be issued. Registration then followed, taking between 1 to 6 months. By December 2001, 1.2 million previously unregistered households (6.3 million people) living just above or below the national poverty line gained titles. The programme is widely recognised as the largest slum titling programme in the developing world [12].

Rigorous evaluations of the impacts of the programme show statistically significant employment benefits for beneficiaries (as compared to untitled beneficiaries that the programme had yet to reach). Hours worked outside the home rose significantly, particularly for men, while child labour decreased. The most plausible interpretation of these findings is that prior to the titling programme the insecurity of tenure meant that adult men spent less time working outside of the home as a strategy to guard the dwelling and their possessions, instead allocating children to do market work. The titling programme seems to have lifted the burden of this type of guard-labour, thus freeing adults, and men in particular, to devote more time to market labour while reducing child labour. This interpretation is supported by the fact that beneficiaries report feeling less at risk of eviction as compared to non-beneficiaries [12].

3.2 Refurbishment of vacant and illegally occupied buildings in São Paulo

The municipality of São Paulo enacted the 2001 City Statute and 2014 Strategic Master Plan to partner with housing movements and technical experts to create housing out of vacant and illegally occupied buildings. A key example is the Elza Soares occupation (Lord Palace Hotel), where 200 families occupied the building in 2012 under Frente de Luta por Moradia (FLM). The hotel underwent a series of upgrades which were completed in 2022. The initial occupants now have formal housing within the city.

The City of Cape Town has identified a large number of so-called “problem buildings.” The São Paulo experience illustrates the potential to turn these building into affordable housing opportunities that should in theory shorten the waitlists for public housing and indirectly ease some of the pressure to expand the use of TRAs in high density, spatially distant, informal settlements.

Closing thoughts

Our proposal of adapting unoccupied and illegally occupied buildings in the City as a response to the housing crisis didn’t seem to find much traction with the audience of municipality officials. Jonty Cogger, as a lawyer for the Ndifuna Ukwazi Law Centre, had just returned from the Constitutional Court hearing in the case of Tafelberg. Though we did not discuss this case, Tafelberg and the other well known site under current legal contestation, Cissie Gool House, are two examples that could benefit from the lessons from how the the municipality of São Paulo responded to the Elza Soares occupation.

See the team’s original written submission to the Human Rights Commission

 

References

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  2.  Barnhardt, S., Field, E. & Pande, R. Moving to Opportunity or Isolation? Network Effects of a Randomized Housing Lottery in Urban India. American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 9, 1–32. (2017).
  3. Ludwig, J. et al. Neighborhood Effects on the Long-Term Well-Being of Low-Income Adults. Science 337, 1505–1510. issn: 0036-8075. (2012).
  4. Chetty, R., Hendren, N. & Katz, L. F. The Effects of Exposure to Better Neighborhoods on Children: New Evidence from the Moving to Opportunity Experiment. American Economic Review 106, 855– 902. (2016).
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  9. Ranslem, D. ‘Temporary’ Relocation: Spaces of Contradiction in South African Law. International Journal of Law in the Built Environment 7, 55–71. 0041 (2015).
  10. Galiani, S. et al. Shelter from the storm: Upgrading housing infrastructure in Latin American slums. Journal of Urban Economics 98. Urbanization in Developing Countries: Past and Present, 187–213. issn: 0094-1190. (2017).
  11. Takeuchi, A., Cropper, M. & Bento, A. Measuring the welfare effects of slum improvement programs: The case of Mumbai. Journal of Urban Economics 64, 65–84. issn: 0094-1190. (2008).
  12. Field, E. Entitled to Work: Urban Property Rights and Labor Supply in Peru*. The Quarterly Journal of Economics 122, 1561–1602. (2007).