Property development is a hot topic, especially at the top end of the market where the game is running rampant.

At the bottom, 1,8 million people live in shacks and are becoming increasingly angry at the slow pace of development. Yet there are interesting moves afoot in the quest to create homes for all.

GLENDA NEVILL from The Big Issue investigates
There has been a fundamental shift in housing policy, one that is aimed at creating a single residential housing market that is inclusive of all South Africans and ensures that everyone has a chance to access housing as an asset for wealth creation.

Government has expanded the housing department's mandate to encompass the whole residential housing market, and this means integrating the primary and secondary markets. Like so many areas of South African life, there is duality in the residential property market; the first economy market has boomed but made housing less affordable for low-to-middle income markets while the second economy is in a slump. The decline in housing delivery has been linked to the withdrawal of large construction groups from the low cost housing arena due to low profit margins.

Government has to address the problem holistically. Minister Lindiwe Sisulu has had a look at the big picture and has delivered a big national agenda to deal with it. The document that reveals the department's plan, Breaking New Ground: A Comprehensive Plan for the Development of Human Settlements, looks at housing across the spectrum, from speeding up delivery of better quality RDP houses and creating dignified human settlements around them to the issues of accommodating the burgeoning middle market who are earning too much for state-assisted housing but locked out of the primary market by soaring prices.

Then there's the idea of integrating people from different economic spectrums in well-located areas, and what is bound to become a controversial issue once implemented: a proposal that 20% of all residential developments would constitute low-to-affordable cost housing.

It's a mammoth task. The responsibility for implementing the vision has been given to municipalities. Local government is to manage the process of locating land for development as well as to facilitate spatial restructuring of the land acquired.

"Government has recognised that policy until now exacerbated the marginalisation of poor people," says Barbara Southworth, director of the City of Cape Town's Spatial Development and Urban Design Unit. She is in charge of strategy and development.

"The quality and location of state-assisted housing hasn't changed the apartheid housing model. The houses were still little boxes plonked in the middle of nowhere, far from public transport and jobs and without any significant infrastructure. For me the most important shift in policy is that government has recognised that design is important, that we have to invest in the public environment in order to create sustainable communities."

Southworth won the prestigious international Ralph and Ruth Erskine award for socially-concerned architecture - awarded every three years by the Swedish Institute of Architects - for her Dignified Places Programme that is being implemented in projects in Khayelitsha and Phillipi.

"The City is proactively looking for land to build more affordable housing. Not just for RDP houses, but for people wanting to move to the next level. This is not about just fixing up existing places - although we're encouraging that too - but about building a new type of development, one that is diverse, of higher quality and that gives people the chance to move up the housing ladder. We also need to make rental stock available," Southworth says.

Big plans take time to implement so in the meantime, she says, the City will improve the stock and quality of available housing while investigating unused bulk rights in areas, for example, such as Voortrekker Road where there is land with development rights. Areas such as this, as well as parts of Bellville, Woodstock and Salt River, have been declared Urban Development Zones (UDZs) and government will offer tax incentives to developers who build on land within these zones.

"We're encouraging people to become landlords," says Southworth. "All those two-storey buildings along Victoria Road could provide rental stock if owners would create homes above the shops. Government is offering tax incentives to landlords who upgrade their buildings. We can...