Sunday, September 25, 2005

Housing row looms in the Western Cape

Larger families and the elderly are provisionally to be first in the queue for subsidised housing in the Western Cape in terms of a controversial new government housing policy.

This means, for example, that families with five children are likely to be higher on the list than those with four.

This is the word from national Housing Minister Lindiwe Sisulu, who this week gave Sunday Argus an exclusive glimpse of the outcome of a process she undertook to consolidate the more than 300 overlapping waiting lists in the province. She said these priorities would be balanced with those historically high on waiting lists.
On Friday, Sisulu signed a social contract with representatives of all roleplayers in the housing industry in an effort to step up construction aimed at eradicating all informal settlements by 2014. She promised that a massive increase in building was about to kick off, with her housing plan's flagship, the N2 Gateway housing project in Cape Town, already under way. Read more
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