Nelson Mandela Bay residents who have been on the housing waiting list for years could be given the option to build their own houses on land provided by the city.
That is if the Nelson Mandela Bay municipality decides over the next two days to include the initiative in the city’s five- to 10-year human settlements plan.
The Housing Indaba, underway at the Nelson Mandela Bay Stadium, will also be looking for solutions to the land invasions crisis in the city, as well as the derelict buildings in the city centre.
The metro’s human settlements boss, Nolwandle Gqiba, said the aim of the indaba was to give the city’s human settlements portfolio committee the mandate to draw up policies on social housing as well as a developers policy that speaks to the property rates tariffs.
Gqiba advised councillors, officials and guests from the Eastern Cape department of human settlements to consider letting people build their own houses.
“If you go to the Transkei, in fact just outside East London, you see beautiful homes,” she said.
“These are homes that people built themselves, and it is a opportunity we should be creating here in the city.”
Gqiba said the municipality had, to date, installed services on 32,000 sites.
“If you look at the rate at which we are building houses, we are lagging behind and that statistic on its own paints a picture,” she said.
Gqiba said because 62,000 of the people on the housing waiting list were aged between 35 and 55, there was an urgent need to turn the derelict buildings in central into social housing or mixed use housing units.“If we don’t change the derelict buildings in central for settlements, we are barking up the wrong tree,” she said.
“It is urgent that we focus on the inner city development.
“These are people who are going to be economically active, these are people that are still young.”
Gqiba said she could not yet say how the initiative to allocate land would unfold.Human settlements political head Nqaba Bhanga said they would also present ideas on how to deal with the land invasion crisis in the city.
“There have been massive invasions in the city, this indaba will attempt to resolve that and look at how we are going to deal with that,” he said.
“We want to look at the numbers, where these people come from and whether they have benefited in housing before.
“If there are those who have not benefited and are legitimate how do we relocate them?”
In addition, Bhanga said they would also look into formalising the areas that had been invaded.