By Christo Luüs
The Republic of South Africa covers an area of 1.2 million km2 - nearly twice the size of the state of Texas in the United States. Since 1994, the country comprises nine provinces, four of which have coastlines. South Africa has eleven official languages. The home language of 55% of the population is isiZulu, isiXhosa, or Afrikaans. The lingua franca in most urban areas is English.
There are significant disparities in terms of human development in South Africa; not only between provinces, but also between population groups. The two smallest provinces, Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal, account for around 40% of the country’s population. Gauteng and the Western Cape generate around 56% of South African GDP. Some 55% of the population live in urban areas. Gauteng is the most urbanised province, with 96% of its people living in cities. At the other extreme, only 13% of the population of the Limpopo Province live in urban areas.
South Africa’s high unemployment rate, estimated at around 30% of the economically active population, clearly implies that income will be skewed, and that a significant portion of households are not able to afford even meagre housing facilities. In fact, more than 40% of dwellings can be classified as “informal housing”, whereas a further significant percentage of the “formal” housing market would presumably also be of rather poor quality. The residential property market in South Africa comprises approximately seven million formal
dwellings. There is no firm data, but the value of the residential property market in 2002 was estimated at roughly R750bn3 ($146bn at a PPP exchange rate of ZAR5.15 to the USD).
The government has succeeded in building nearly 1.5 million low-cost housing units during the period 1994 to 2003. This has provided some support to the construction sector, which suffered from surplus capacity during the late 1980s and early 1990s. - Download the full report here.
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