Delivering human settlements as an anti-poverty strategy: spatial paradigms

Abstract

Although the backlog remains, this powerful intervention has increasingly been recognised as a key policy weapon against poverty. However, in 2011, under severe budget pressure, the DHS (2011) announced that delivery of free-of-charge subsidised housing could not continue indefinitely, so that government would look in future to owner-built housing. At the same time, more and more attention has been turning from poverty settlements to housing's potentially profitable gap market, the broken rung on the housing ladder just above subsidised poverty housing. This sector represents the large shortfall in better housing that needs to be available and affordable to upwardly mobile earners who are not yet middle class, and it offers opportunities for the private sector (Rust & North 2008).