The City of Johannesburg aims to build an additional 40 000 housing units between now and the end of its 2010/11 financial year, mayor Amos Masondo told a media briefing on Wednesday, which followed on from the city's Housing Summit.

The programme was part of a larger five-year, R5,8-billion plan to build 100 000 houses, with about 60 000 houses having already been built over the past three years.

"The housing delivery trend over the past two years has been in the region of 20 000 units a year. This will not be an easy task, owing to the current financial crisis. The city is looking at how to minimise the negative impact by reprioritising its own programmes and focusing on key service delivery initiatives," Masondo said.

The summit, which was convened under the theme ‘we listen, we deliver', was a culmination of a consultative process with stakeholders, including: the community leaders, ward committees, nongovernmental organisations, developers, contractors, suppliers of building materials, property managers, planners, engineers, architects, lawyers and financiers.

Masondo warned contractors at the summit that the building of substandard structures was unacceptable. "If there are cracks in the walls as a result of not enough cement being used, contractors . . . will be pursued legally and otherwise."

The city, led by both the Housing Department and the Development Planning and Urban Management Department, was also engaged in a comprehensive process of formalising and regularising all its informal settlements.

"We have a total of 180 informal settlements and the aim of the formalisation is to provide certainty to people living in these areas. These initiatives, it is hoped, will encourage individuals to identify relevant resources and invest in these properties," noted Masondo.

The city intended providing people living in informal settlements the right to occupy and use the land, subject to certain conditions. These were spelt out in amendments to the town planning schemes and related mainly to aspects such as: building materials, spacing between domiciles, density of dwellings, and the use of dwellings for nonresidential purposes.

Meanwhile, the city's focus to date on rental and public stock had been on the transfer of the public housing stock from the city's Department of Housing to qualifying beneficiaries and/or to that Johannesburg Social Housing Company.

By June 2009, the city had transferred ownership of around 10 400 housing rental units to legal tenants.