The City’s Mayoral Committee Member for Human Settlements, Councillor Malusi Booi, conducted a site visit at the City’s Langa Block 203, 204 and 206 Community Residential Units (CRU), as well as the Epping Forest affordable housing rental units. The City’s Public Housing Department has started its new maintenance and repair initiative, where small and medium-size contractors will do work on CRUs across the metro.
In April this year, the City’s Public Housing Department embarked on their new R150m initiative over the next three years, to not only enhance necessary and important maintenance and repairs to its affordable rental units across the metro, but also to empower small and medium-size contractors by giving them the opportunity to do the work.
This is a partnership between the City and the National Housing Finance Corporation (NHFC). Due to the vast number of affordable rental stock units the City has, low levels of rental income collected for maintenance work and limited resources, there are repairs and maintenance service request backlogs.
The contractors are first primarily focussing on units which have suffered fire damage. The contractors will complete the repairs to 216 fire-damaged units in City-wide rental units by mid-2021, if all goes according to plan. The units had been damaged due to petrol bomb attacks, stoves being left on and unattended by tenants, and illegal electrical connections, among others.
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R1 billion in maintenance and upgrades over the last two years
“We are pleased with the progress being made by the small and medium-size contractors. The work is continuing ahead of schedule, and if all goes according to plan, we expect the repairs to the fire-damaged units to be completed later this year,” said Councillor Booi.
“Over the past two years, the City has spent approximately R1 billion in maintenance and upgrades to our public housing units, and we thank our tenants for their support while the required work is carried out. We remind residents that the City is dependent on rental income to repair and maintain our public housing units and we encourage our tenants to pay what they can,” added Councillor Booi.
