How politics shapes segregation

Political lessons for South Africa from Brazil's favelas

South Africa will next year celebrate three decades since the dawn of the democratic era. While the focus will be on a national election – as one political party claims, 2024 is this generation’s 1994 –another commemoration deserves special attention: it will be three decades since the Reconstruction and Development Programme (or RDP).

The RDP was an attempt to alleviate poverty and address the large socio-economic disparities created by apartheid. The plan was to use government resources to provide basic services, including housing, clean water, electrification and healthcare, to those previously excluded from the formal economy. The most ambitious of these plans was certainly housing: the goal was to construct one million houses within five years.

To do this, the newly elected government provided subsidies to low-income households. These subsidies were used to finance the construction of what became known as RDP houses, which were then given to eligible families to foster home ownership. To qualify, families or individuals had to be South African citizens, over 21, and earning less than a specified income threshold. They also had to be first-time homeowners and have dependents.

Under the People’s Housing Process model, the recipients of the houses were expected to contribute to the building of their homes, either through their labour or by managing the construction. This was meant to empower the beneficiaries and stretch the government’s limited resources. The extent to which beneficiaries could meaningfully contribute, however, varied widely.

Was the RDP housing plan a success? Yes and no. Yes, because it achieved its target. In the seven years between 1994 and 2001, 1.1 million affordable houses were built with government subsidies, housing 5 of the estimated 12.5 million South Africans without formal housing. Although these houses were often tiny and constructed poorly – one research study found that only 30% of RDP houses complied with building regulations – they not only provided a roof where none had been but also often gave households access to clean water, sanitation and electricity, improving their quality of life substantially.

But it also amplified the spatial segregation that is still so evident today.

The best way to see this is to visit almost any small South African town. Let’s take Ashton, a rural town in the Western Cape. Drive through Ashton – now with an impressive arched bridge – and two things are apparent: a split down the centre that separates the former white and coloured neighbourhoods, and on the periphery, 5 km away, is Zolani, a township inhabited mainly by black residents. (In the 2011 census, 54% of the population was classified as coloured, 41% black, and 5% white.) When apartheid ended, the small, impoverished community of mostly seasonal farm workers would have hoped for a better life for all. And the RDP houses that one still sees from the R301, many of them of ramshackle quality, are a testament to a government that did provide some assistance. But instead of addressing the spatial segregation so characteristic of the apartheid era, the RDP houses built after 1994 entrenched those inequalities. The spatial patterns of most South African cities and towns today largely reflect the spatial patterns of the previous dispensation.

But such spatial persistence of townships is not inevitable, argues University of Pennsylvania political scientist Alice Xu in a new paper. She studies the political origins of segregation in Brazilian cities, along with South Africa, one of the most unequal countries on earth. Using sophisticated econometric approaches, she makes two important findings. First, social housing programmes in Brazil ‘created more segregated cities because units were built in bulk where land is cheapest on urban peripheries’. This may not be that surprising, but she finds that this result varies depending on the government in power: The segregationist effects of these federal social housing programmes ‘are magnified in cities that happened to be governed by leftist mayoral coalitions, strong proponents of the policy’. By contrast, cities ‘governed by centrist and right-wing mayoral coalitions that actively rejected the federal social housing policies became less segregated’.

Why is this? Politics.

Housing is a type of social policy that politicians like because it is easy to claim credit. In 2009, Brazilian president Lula da Silva’s Worker’s Party (PT) launched a massive poverty alleviation strategy similar to South Africa’s RDP fifteen years earlier, promising public funds to realise the ‘Brazilian dream’ of home ownership even for the poorest. Local political leaders aligned with the PT were keen to claim credit for this policy, ensuring that many more housing units were built than in those cities governed by mayors unaffiliated with the PT. Because these politicians wanted to build as many housing units as possible, they built them on land that was as cheap as possible, usually on the outskirts of cities. Although more houses were built in cities with mayors aligned to Lula’s Worker’s Party, those cities became much more segregated.

Does that mean that regulation inevitably causes segregation? Not necessarily. Again, politics matter. Xu shows that during the era of market liberalisation in Brazil (the 1990s), the number of housing units increased rapidly as the private sector was given free rein. This was especially true in cities with centrist or right-leaning mayors. Most of this construction boom was, however, for middle and upper-class families, leading to housing shortages for lower-income families. Gentrification, where rising property values push out poorer residents, forced many of the poorest out of inner-city slums and into slums on the periphery, increasing segregation.

By contrast, cities with left-leaning mayors were more likely to introduce land-use and zoning regulations to limit the impact of liberalisation, protecting inner-city slums. Those cities are today less segregated.

The fact that left and right-leaning political readers can shape segregation shows that economic policy is not about simply following a blueprint. Context matter. When the left-leaning national government launched a social policy to build more housing, the aim should not have been to build as many houses as possible. It should have been to give the poorest decent housing within the inner-city (where they were living), even if it meant building fewer houses.

And when the right-leaning national government implemented liberalisation policies that allowed for much faster (private) construction of housing, it made sense to enact local policies that protected the most vulnerable against gentrification.

Thirty years after the RDP, let us not forget that the best outcome for society always requires a delicate balance between market forces and government regulation.

An edited version of this article was first published on News24. Image created with Midjourney v5.2.