Backyard room offers solution to SA’s housing crisis

One of my most important childhood memories involves my family living together in my grandmother’s garden. As with most houses in Soweto, the garden typically contained a main residence where the family lived and some smaller back rooms that were rented out to individuals or small families.

My grandmother had three such back rooms in her garden, which became home to many people throughout my life. Some of them have children who have become my friends, some are temporary workers from neighboring states, and some have been there for almost three generations.

This way of living was part of determining how I understood community, how I understood different housing forms, and how the neighborhood grew and developed beyond the original freestanding homes on the designed sites.

Recently, the idea of ​​“backyard housing” has become a hot topic. After years of resistance and being ignored as serious market participants, some are finally realizing that backyard housing could provide a roadmap to solving South Africa’s housing crisis, which continues to stare us squarely in the face.

What if backyard building, which has been seen solely as a means of survival, is actually a natural evolution of urban development? And what if it could provide housing and earn a living at the same time?

Former United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon once asserted that “housing makes a significant contribution to national economic development in various ways, including increasing capital stock, fixed investment, and savings.” This is a thoughtful summary of how housing is more than just a consumer product, but can be a strategic tool in a country’s economic development goals.

As architects, my colleagues and I might wonder if we could design ourselves out of the housing problems facing many urban areas in South Africa today. There is a widespread belief that if we spend more money and build more districts, we can close the gap.

All major housing projects come with the usual bottlenecks of bureaucracy, financing, land and community disputes. With that understanding, my biggest concern with this model is that it concentrates housing supply into an inefficient model that fails to respond effectively to the nuances of the housing market, eliminating the associated economic potential.

backyard homes thrive

This is where backyard housing is thriving. As a product of townships in the 1980s, it has grown into a housing market representing 1.25 million households, or 35% of all rental properties in South Africa.

According to the 2011 Urban LandMark report ‘Small Private Rentals in South Africa’, the small housing market, such as backyard homes, is one of ‘South Africa’s most successful, efficient and widespread accommodation provision systems’.

Backyard housing can provide truly affordable housing for the gap market (people earning between R3,500 and R15,000 per month), while at the same time, as it is known, being a source of income for landlords and micro-developers.

These small-scale private investments help build communities, provide housing, provide income, and densify urban areas with little or no funding from governments.

Local governments would benefit more in this scenario because they would be able to own more taxable property while reducing the amount of housing they would have to provide.

This builds prosperity for citizens and governments, usually previously disadvantaged populations, and allows them to invest in other amenities that improve their quality of life. These smaller projects mean the workforce is more localized, potentially resulting in more spending and reinvestment in the community.

Suburbanisation and the ideal of building single-family homes on site have permeated our national consciousness, and in South Africa it is considered ‘development’. The 1994 Housing White Paper and subsequent State Subsidy Scheme have guided the government’s approach to housing since 1994, creating a disastrous urban environment of RDP areas and subsequent unsustainable urban sprawl.

This approach to urban development and, by extension, housing has proven to be socially and financially unsustainable. As any good urban planner will tell you, a sustainable urban environment requires density to fund supporting infrastructure, such as public transport and sewage systems, and to create the conditions for economic activity that is not dependent on car ownership (a major source of pollution). Dense neighborhoods tend to be more walkable, have better access to amenities, and most importantly, encourage the survival of small businesses.

The word density scares many people. They see it as a threat to the green lawns and safety of the suburbs, and imagine the rolling streets of the CBD.

But as Chuck Marlon of Strong Towns, a nonprofit organization that advocates for stronger, more sustainable towns and cities, says, when we think of density, it shouldn’t just be high-rise apartment buildings. The dense neighborhood is comprised of townhouses, rowhouses, two-story walk-ups, duplexes/triplexes, and most importantly, multiple residences on individual lots, essentially representing what backyard housing is all about.

Backyard housing is an intelligent way to densify existing structures in cities. Smart densification allows small landowners to self-fund neighborhood upgrades by gradually closing gaps in the urban fabric.

So why haven’t we adopted backyard housing as a model?

stigma

Stigma is one of the biggest deterrents to the more formal introduction of backyard housing. It is sometimes difficult for people to accept that ideas developed in townships have value. The relationship with the township (black people) is also outside of what is portrayed through Western development ideals. For many South Africans, even those who live in townships, townships are a place of escape rather than a place of development potential.

While most people imagine yards filled with shacks and crude structures, backyard residential spaces have long evolved beyond that.

While it is true that shacks in people’s backyards are a reality in many townships, the formalization of backyard rentals has been occurring over the years as the market reacts to the high standards expected by tenants who have moved into the lower middle class and as competition in the market increases.

Micro-developers have become full-fledged entrepreneurs developing studio, one- and even two-bedroom apartments on par with those offered in the more “formal” sectors of the sector.

This recognition of the market by the government and financial institutions will go a long way in removing bias against the market.

access to capital

But a predictable barrier is finance. South Africa’s conservative financial institutions are reluctant to support this type of investment within their traditional lending tools and have not yet begun to develop microfinance packages that can be used to support this market.

It is easier for a large developer to access billions of rands of capital than for a landlord to access R100 000 to develop a few rental units. That is the reality of the South African economy. There is a huge gap between the formal and informal economies, even those that are trying to formalize.

Fortunately, there are startups that have identified this market and are creating funding tools that developers can access. IsiDuli is one of the startups backed by AlphaCode, a Rand Merchant Holding investment initiative that funds promising fintech startups in SA.

Zoning and land use restrictions

What and how people build is strictly regulated by local and regional governments. This regulation is set forth in the Zoning and Land Use Ordinance.

Disposable zoning, which has dominated development patterns for the past 60 years, is largely responsible for the inflexible approach to architecture. Relaxing regulations and zoning rules to allow backyard homes to flourish could add even more fuel to the industry.

Local government involvement can also help guide this development pattern towards becoming a sustainable contributor to the neighborhood. Cities and neighborhoods evolve, but zoning regulations, as currently designed, severely restrict growth and development in the name of maintaining the status quo.

Zoning codes can be an effective tool to help shape neighborhoods rather than restrict their growth.

To solve a big problem, you may need to resist the urge to master plan everything to a near-perfect state. Great, sustainable and resilient cities aren’t built that way. They are incremental. They are built on small bets by small investors who form part of these communities.

While I am not lost on the urgency of this country’s housing crisis and the need for urban development, I believe that building slowly and effectively benefits everyone. Building quickly and at scale has several benefits.

Soweto is a good example of the argument I have developed. Soweto has already entered its next phase of development, with what were once single-storey backyard units being transformed into two-storey apartment blocks with no main residence. It highlights the many stages of evolution. The market grew rapidly and brought great wealth to Soweto’s residents.

Backyard housing won’t solve all your housing problems, but it’s a powerful tool that shouldn’t be ignored even if you try.

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