Perception of Community Members on the provision of Low Cost Housing in Kwa-Dlangezwa Area, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa

Abstract

The South African government of democracy have shown to prioritise the provision of low cost housing to poor communities. This paper critically investigates the perception of community members on the provision of low cost housing. The paper followed qualitative approach with an ethnographic research design and semi-structured interviews, as a result, the open ended questions were used as a tool for data collection. The snowball sampling was adopted as a procedure to sample the intended participants. The sample size of this paper was 36 participants and content analysis was used to analyse and categorise the data. The provision of low cost housing in South Africa was introduced with an intention to deal with racial inequalities created during apartheid period, while also addressing issues related to poor services delivery in local municipalities. Some of the indispensable facets of the findings expose that the local government is struggling to address the existence of bottlenecks in ensuring housing provision and the apparently cumulative demand of housing. The findings of the study found that the low cost housing beneficiaries were not involved during the processes of decision making and implementation phase of the projects. While political affiliation noted as an underlying factor that creates unfairness provision of low cost housing. Therefore, municipal officials through ward councillors and community leaders should play an essential role to facilitate smooth provision of low cost housing, while ensuring that the intervention reaches intended beneficiaries without unnecessary backlogs.