Inclusionary housing policy in cities of the south: navigating a path between continuity and disruption

Inclusionary housing policy (IHP) encourages developers to provide affordable housing in well-located areas. This can add to their costs and risks, so the process of policy adoption is complicated and contested. This paper provides a synthesis of the literature and then analyzes the efforts to implement IHP of two South African cities, Johannesburg and Cape Town. The core proposition is that making residential development more inclusive requires at least three ingredients to ensure meaningful change. First, the case for reform needs popular support and an active civil society to secure the backing of political leaders and officials facing resistance from entrenched real estate interests. Second, the policy needs to be feasible in an economic sense and calibrated in an incremental way that will not jeopardize private investment. Third, a robust legal framework is required to institutionalize the changes and to limit disputes and disruption.