South Africa's Constitutional Court Rules Cape Town Failed to Provide Affordable Housing

South Africa's Constitutional Court delivered a unanimous judgment, authored by Justice Nonkosi Mhlantla, finding that the City of Cape Town and the Western Cape government have failed for a decade to meet their constitutional duty to create affordable housing. The ruling highlighted the 2016 sale of a disused remedial school on Sea Point’s Main Road for R135 million to a private Jewish day school, a transaction that sparked a long‑standing housing activism campaign demanding social housing on the site.

Since the court case, property prices in Sea Point have risen to roughly one and a half times the citywide median, and Airbnb listings have surged by almost 200 percent since 2022. Rising rents have pushed many residents, both citizens and undocumented migrants, into peripheral townships and settlements that were historically designed under apartheid to separate black communities from the city centre. These under‑resourced areas now face shortages of clinics, policing, water, electricity and schools.

At the same time, anti‑immigrant protests have intensified. On 30 June in Durban, the March and March movement announced a series of weekly demonstrations, aiming to expel undocumented migrants from the streets over six months. The movement’s rhetoric reflects growing xenophobic sentiment tied to housing scarcity and spatial inequality across South Africa.