Abstracts

68 with the receiving of a government-subsidized unit. Moreover, Levenson (2014, p. 20) says “RDP delivery has reinforced the apartheid era geography of relegation by formalizing peripherally located shack settlements, rendering their far-flung locations permanent.” Essentially, this separation reconstructs and maintains the racialized segregation upon which South African cities were founded. Although unintentional, the result of RDP housing distribution serves to perpetuate the cycles of poverty that it was intended to disrupt. Overall, RDP housing largely focused on home ownership without recognizing the interconnected nature of housing disparities and how they are tied to systematic racism. Some argue that the rise in informal housing and RDP implementation com- plemented each other. Despite the delivery of three million units, within the past two decades, “the number of informal settlements has increased more than nine-fold” (Levenson, 2014, p. 15). In fact, the number of informal settlements has skyrocketed from about 300 in 1994 to around 2700 today (Levy, 2019). Thus, even as many RDP units were built, the country saw an exponential increase in the number of people living in backyard dwellings or shacks. Levenson (2014, p. 15) argues that a quarter of urban South African populations live in informal housing and, given the reality of racialized systems of power and oppression, nonwhite populations are adversely housed in under-resourced communities and settlements. Informal housing can take different forms, such as the occupation of abandoned buildings or shack-like structures. These structures often are erected in the backyard of a property for a relatively low rental price. Most of the land these structures occupy is rented, but that is not always the case. Lemanski (2009, p. 472) cites the growth in these backyard dwellings as an unintentional outcome of the country’s formal housing policies. Arguably, “the government’s housing policy of homeownership only works because backyard dwellings provide sufficient income for poor homeowners to cope with the demands of formal living” (p. 482). RDP housing delivery has unintentionally allowed urban housing informality to grow and thrive as opposed to serving as a remedy. The living conditions in these backyard dwellings are rife with many issues like lack of access to sanitation. In one case study, Lemanski (2009, p. 477) shows that most landlords lock their toilet at night, and nearly 12% do not give residents access to their bathroom at all, forcing them to go outside. In 2009, approximately 75,400 households lived in backyard dwellings in Cape Town, and they were almost entirely black or colored (p. 473). Again, this showcases the extreme racialized disparities in housing location and living conditions that are observed in postapartheid South Africa today. In another effort to address the housing plight, the People’s Housing Process (PHP) was a program established by the Minister of Housing in 1998 that sought to minimize disparities in housing by increasing community participation in the housing delivery process. This program aimed to collaborate with nongovernmental agencies in the housing sector to help communities plan and execute the construction of housing units in settlements. Despite good intentions, the idea of community participation was not explicitly defined; consequently, stakeholders lacked proper support and assistance. Some have criticized that PHP shifted the cost and burden of housing delivery onto the poor, who are impacted most directly, under the guise of a “community-based” solution. Other critics have mentioned that PHP participation was limited to the construction of housing, making it a solution that was divorced from other key elements entangled in the historical context of marginalization (Tissington, 2011, pp. 62–63). In 2008, the Department of Human Settlements passed the Enhanced PHP (ePHP) as a replacement to the PHP program. This new program resulted from many of the issues and limitations with the previous PHP. Arguably, ePHP holds a wider definition of “community participation,” allowing for more choice under the idea of “people centered development” (Tissington, 2011, p. 82). This program seeks to center beneficiaries, including individuals and communities. Widening this scope within housing shifts the focus of the outcome as opposed to isolating the process from the context, as previously described. ePHP seems