LOCAL ELECTIONS 2026: Here’s how political parties plan to tackle Cape Town’s Airbnb and housing crisis

{JSON.stringify(article.attachments[0], null, 2)} --> Daily Maverick asked some of the major parties gunning for Cape Town’s mayoral seat how they viewed Cape Town’s housing shortage – and how they planned to address it. Here’s what they had to say.

Ask any Capetonian what they think of their rent and their response will probably include a string of profanities.

Average rent in the Western Cape outstrips all other provinces, with tenants paying R12,561 per month in the latest quarter – a 9.7% increase from Q1 – for accommodation, according to the PayProp 2026 Rental Index. That’s R1,999 more than the runner-up, Northern Cape.

Ndifuna Ukwazi, a social justice organisation that advocates for access to affordable land, painted a sombre picture of how unaffordable the Mother City has become for its residents.

According to them, 76% of the city’s population earns below R22,000 a month, 58% earn below R10,000, and 25% earn below R3,500 a month. They argue that standard affordability benchmarks for housing should not exceed 30% to 33% of a household’s income, yet more than half of the city cannot afford payments exceeding R3,333.

Taking this into consideration along with PayProp’s findings, only the top percentile of the city’s population can comfortably afford its rental/bond prices. In central suburbs like Sea Point, the average monthly rental fees for a one-bedroom apartment can reach more than R20,000, almost totally pricing out local residents.

Ndifuna Ukwazi points to colonial-era land dispossessions along with apartheid-era spatial planning, like the Group Areas Act, for initiating Cape Town’s housing crisis.

“Post-1994 state housing policy prioritised building Breaking New Ground (BNG/RDP) houses on cheap, distant land, creating “poverty traps”.