North West MEC for Local Government and Human Settlements Collen Maine has committed to building 6 888 housing units in this financial year with a focus on eradicating informal settlements.

“We want to create access to clean water and decent sanitation and provision of tenure to the beneficiaries. We are doing this in order to achieve our objective, and bring comfort to our people living in informal settlements across the province. Thus far we managed to build about 4538 through the Informal Settlements Upgrading in the last financial year,” said Maine.

Maine made this commitment when delivering his departmental budget speech at the North West Legislature this week. He also committed his department to ensuring that beneficiaries became owners of those properties.

The department is expected to spend more than R1.5 billion in this financial year in housing development.

 

Work started I mining towns

Maine went on to inform the Legislature that work has already started in mining towns. He said that approximately 2 000 housing units will be built in the next three years in the Marikana Extension 2 Integrated Development Project which is implemented in partnership with LONMIN and Rustenburg local municipality.

The first phase of 292 Breaking New Ground units is already underway and 252 community residential units are planned for this financial year, with contractors already on site.

 

6 900 title deeds

The department will further hand over 6 900 title deeds to household owners across the province.

“We acknowledge that there is a backlog of eradicating title deeds and that efforts will be doubled to make sure that we win the battle of making sure that communities own their properties”, he conceded, adding that the department will use 100% of its conditional grant in this financial year.