Global wars will change the way we think about Cape Town’s housing crisis

My father shared a memory with me a few years ago. He was reminiscing about President Thabo Mbeki’s South Africa. Men looking for work would stand at a corner, he said, and a lorry would pull up and employ some for that day, each working day.

Since then, labour laws have evolved (or regressed, depending on who you ask) towards a neoliberal landscape with brokers, digital nomads and gig economy hustlers. I now know more aspiring content creators than apprentice bricklayers — and even fewer homeowners. So, while it’s tempting to treat Cape Town’s affordability crisis as a referendum on political and economic ideology, the matter may be more mechanical than that: it’s more about lorries than it is about policies.

According to the Cape Town general valuation roll, the city’s residential property stock has risen in value. We generally know demand is being pushed up by foreign property buyers and short-term accommodation seekers; resilience upgrades in solar, water storage and security have also affected valuations. But what the system doesn’t tell us is whether that value was created with or without ordinary South Africans. That data sits somewhere else.

When a cluster of homeowners retrofit their properties, the value uplift spreads to households that couldn’t have afforded to install anything or accommodate anyone. They become richer and priced out at the same time. In response, mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis has argued that the path to affordability is building more property stock; rent control has failed everywhere it’s been tried. Kiasha Naidoo, a University of the Western Cape philosophy lecturer, replied that Hill-Lewis’s market logic would only hold in a competitive market and that Cape Town’s property market isn’t that because a handful of large developers dominate supply.

In different ways, Hill-Lewis and Naidoo argue that supply is the bottleneck. But this should be impossible. How can one city have the country’s lowest Gini coefficient, the country’s biggest affordability crisis and market dominance concentrated among a few suppliers who can’t keep up with the demand, all at once? Liberal, pro-market and merit-based ideologies focused on economic growth and efficient service delivery aren’t supposed to create monopolies – are they? Yet here we are with a city of people reacting like those makeover show families: smiling and gushing with joy while the cameras roll, and saddled with soaring tax bills long after the production has moved on.

Policy is an aspiration; its writers can’t be everywhere to monitor enforcement and impact in real time. What’s lost is any sense of how accessible the economic opportunities created by all this development, retrofitting and administration are for ordinary South Africans. If cities aren’t going to cap rent or booking fees anytime soon (though Cape Town will reclassify full-time Airbnbs as commercial entities), they at least need to know whether economic opportunities are meaningfully spread out for everyone or whether the growth mechanisms are extractive. Contrary to ideological wishful thinking, markets don’t automatically train more plumbers, or qualify more conveyancers from historically disadvantaged backgrounds.

The lorry from my father’s memory may have offered little security beyond that day’s wages, but it was geographically legible. Guys from Street A got a shot at Development Opportunity B. People knew where to stand. Today the lorry is invisibly distributed across accredited supplier lists and procurement databases. We’ve changed the connective tissue, but we haven’t replaced it with anything you can see.

Here’s how invisible it’s become: 30 April 2026 has two deadlines. One is Cape Town’s valuation objection deadline. The other is the Workplace Skills Plan and Annual Training Report submission deadline – the mechanism through which companies claim skills development grants, including in the property sector, including for people not yet employed by those companies. The first deadline is about the cost of owning property. The second governs who gets trained to work on it. These systems don’t talk to each other. Nobody’s standing at the intersection asking: are solar installer companies identifying people who need the skills? Is the value chain absorbing them? A coordination layer would immediately flag, for example, that a suburb’s valuation spiked in the same quarter that three solar installation companies submitted skills plans listing zero pupils from any neighborhood known to need skills and opportunities.

This matters more as the world edges towards war. When commodity prices soar, value accrues where wealth is already sitting. We get solar panels from China, batteries from South East Asia, inverter parts from everywhere – and when those supply routes are stressed, the retrofit economy contracts from the outside in. The people with the least foothold in the value chain lose it first. Without coordination infrastructure that connects skills deployment to where value is actually being created, inequality doesn’t just persist, it compounds to the scale of the disruption.

Tech has solved similar coordination problems. Uber did it for transport. Airbnb did it for housing. There are apps for weather, traffic and lots of other things. There are gig apps, but balancing between monetisation models and optimising for social justice will take cohorts of stakeholders in compacts involving all sorts of trade-offs. I’ve got my hand up and I’m putting it out into the world that I am a stakeholder: can’t we save the world over coffee? DM

Siya Khumalo writes about religion, politics, sex and technology. He’s the author of You Have To Be Gay To Know God and The Queer Book Of Revelation (Kwela Books), and a Mandela Washington Fellow. He believes he can solve the world’s problems over a cup of coffee.