Letter: Housing policy must reward agency and choice - Business Day

I agree with the thrust of Bernard Benson’s argument, “Housing policy needs more than good intentions” (July 15), in his response to my letter, though he begins by attributing to me a proposition that is not in fact mine: “I’d like to know what Michael Morris means by ‘everyone’s right to adequate housing’.”

I referred to section 26(1) of the bill of rights, which states: “Everyone has the right to have access to adequate housing.” Section 26(2) says: “The state must take reasonable legislative and other measures, within its available resources, to achieve the progressive realisation of this right.”

What I wrote was that “unless the property developer and the labourer can more or less recognise themselves and their interests in policy instruments directed at overcoming the apartheid spatial plan and everyone’s right to ‘adequate housing’, the truly transformative answer to our long-delayed reimagining of a liberated or democratic or just South Africa will remain elusive”.

In citing the UK experience, where he says once state-provided housing was “sold to their occupiers at a discount … they gained a new lease of life and became a valuable asset”, I think Benson is driving at the same point. This is very much what I had in mind in arguing that policy instruments must “match the dynamism and choice of today’s free society rather than reverting to the restrictive, stifling conditions of the unfree one that preceded it”.

This is partly to say that, as Benson warns, “throwing public money at a problem doesn’t always fix it”.

Michael Morris

Institute of Race Relations

https://www.businessday.co.za/opinion/2026-07-23-letters-to-the-editor/