At least 2.1-million houses needed to be built to clear the backlog exacerbated by rapid urbanisation, Human Settlements Minister Lindiwe Sisulu said on Thursday.

“We had put the figure at 1.9-million a few months ago, but the Statistician General [Pali Lehohla] yesterday in Parliament during his budget debate, confirmed that the number is actually 2.1-million. This means that urbanisation is upon us, the rate that people move from rural areas to towns and cities, populations in informal settlements are increasing…but as we cut the backlog, we can’t stop people from coming in, our target is to build faster and use planning instruments to predict how many can be expected in, and plan for that,” Sisulu said at her department’s campaign launch to celebrate 4.3-million houses built in the past 20 years.

The launch took place at Cosmo City, an area designed to cater for various housing needs. The area is a mix of fully mortgaged, credit-linked and government subsised, or RDP houses. The multibillion-rand project is a partnership between the Johannesburg metro and provincial government.

Other similar projects are Fleurhof in western Johannesburg, Savannah City in the Midvaal, Olivienhoutbosch in northern Johannesburg. There is also the N2 project in Cape Town and another in Durban, Sisulu said.

“Once Fleurhof project is completed, it will have a combination of the Afrikaner community and the black residents of Meadowlands in Soweto. We will have a fully integrated community of Fleurhof, and will also house some of our military veterans there,” she said.

Sisulu said Cosmo City was chosen to launch the celebrations because it was the most advanced project among them all, and had all the development aspects that the department wanted to see happening at other projects.

Cosmo City’s residents were moved from an informal settlement called Skotiphola. Their shacks were built on private land, a few kilometers from where Cosmo City was ultimately developed.