The City of Cape Town and the Cape Town Community Housing Company’s Harmony Village housing project in Mitchells Plain has been lauded for its excellence in service delivery, quality, and efforts to bring dignity to lower-income families, the city said on Sunday.
The Harmony Village project was named the best institutional housing project in the country at the 2016 National Govan Mbeki Awards ceremony at the Durban International Convention Centre this week, mayoral committee member for human settlements Benedicta van Minnen said.
This project had enabled the provision of 850 homes to residents where the household had a maximum monthly income of R3 500. It was part of an institutional housing programme which assisted those who earned too much for fully subsidised houses, but did not qualify for bank loans because their income was too low.
This project was a tangible example of the shift in housing provision that the city wanted to undertake over the next years, where far more focus would be placed on social and institutional housing as a mechanism to drive greater delivery. The city drove social and institutional housing projects through its partners and these projects were usually strongly community-driven. The aim was to increase this type of housing in well-located areas across the metro over the next decades, mostly for residents who earned just more than the threshold of being considered the most vulnerable in society.
Across the metro, the city had budgeted about R230-million in the current financial year for social and institutional housing projects.
“We are very proud of this recognition and I am especially thankful that our officials and partners, who work so hard, have been recognised for their excellence and willingness to go above and beyond the call of duty to ensure that we move towards creating more dignified environments for our lower-income residents.
“All of the projects which we submitted for consideration illustrate in some way or another how the human settlements environment is changing across the country. It shows that we need to increasingly think out of the box to meet the extreme need for housing and that we need to do so through stronger partnerships,” Van Minnen said.
The city was also very proud of its other category frontrunners – the Scottsdene rental housing project, the Langa hostel transformation project, and the Bardale/Mfuleni development. All of these projects emerged as winners in the Provincial Govan Mbeki Awards, which took place earlier this year in September.
