The occupation of state housing as a moral obligation? Housing welfare in Gauteng between reciprocity and liberalism

Abstract

The article analyses how political stakeholders have mobilized a moralizing discourse to blame practices of renting and selling state-subsidized housing by its original recipients. Although departures are mostly legal, owners who do not occupy their units are affected by the state’s moral expectations of reciprocity that extend ambiguous moral claims towards the right use of provided housing far beyond the law. First, we show how the post-apartheid welfare state – similar to conditional cash transfer policies – enhances operational moral logics of obligatory reciprocity to direct people’s behaviour towards favoured forms of market integration. Yet, the moral extension of reciprocal dependency works against the liberal foundations of its own housing policy. Second, we foreground a praxeological perspective towards the operational moral logics structuring how recipients justify their own departure from state housing. Whereas few respondents reject reciprocal obligations, many tend to adopt the state’s moralizing discourse and reproduce reciprocal hierarchies.

Introduction

Providing marginalized groups with a house and access to homeownership has been a key priority of public policy in South Africa after apartheid, during which most Black citizens were excluded from the right to own property in urban areas. Rooted in the 1994 Housing White Paper that concluded a 2-year National Housing Forum, South Africa’s democratic government, headed by the African National Congress (ANC), set up one of the world’s largest – and in quantitative terms, most successful – state-subsidized housing programmes. Since 1994, millions of households earning less than 3500 ZAR (approx. 175 EUR) per month received a once-off capital subsidy bound to a small detached or semi-detached house. Colloquially, these uniform, often one-roomed houses are widely known as ‘RDP houses’ – a name that signifies a strong symbolic connection to ANC’s post-apartheid policy agenda, the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) (Huchzermeyer, 2001). Since 1994, RDP houses have fuelled citizen expectations towards state-led housing supply. As authors like Bank (2023) and Oldfield and Greyling (2015) argue, many South Africans residing in backyard rooms or informal settlements have been waiting and hoping for years for the state to provide them with a formal house and a freehold title. They perceive the national housing programme as a unique opportunity to escape (shelter) poverty and to gain homeownership and eventually equal citizenship.

Against this background, and similar to discussions about targeted and conditional welfare beyond South Africa (Lavinas, 2013; Romano, 2018), heated public debates have emerged about the ‘responsible’ use of RDP houses by recipients – in particular concerning recipients who do not occupy their received units. Legally, it is not forbidden to rent out RDP houses and to resell them after 8 years, but such practices have long been accompanied by astonishment, contempt, and outrage (Beier, 2023; Charlton, 2018; Lemanski, 2011, 2014; Mbatha, 2022, 2023). Policy documents such as Breaking New Ground (BNG) stressed the significance of freehold titles and the related possibility to dispose of houses for a liberal functioning of real estate market. Yet, state actors remained worried that people would throw away their assets, re-settle in shacks, and become a burden on the state again (Charlton, 2018).

It is against this background that we enquire into moralizations of the ‘right’ use of state-subsidized housing (Cowan and McDermont, 2006; Haworth and Manzi, 1999; Marston, 2000) which deserves further attention against the entangled relationship between growing housing demands and the expansion of postcolonial welfare states (Doshi, 2019; Harris and Scully, 2015; Levenson, 2017). Building on theories of the gift (Fourcade, 2020; Godelier, 1999; Mauss, 2002 [1925]) and related notions of welfare regimes as reciprocal arrangements (Adloff and Mau, 2006), we show how moralizations operate through discursive engagements with reciprocal expectations. Therefore, we stress a praxeological analysis foregrounding what Dieterich et al. (in this issue) call the ‘operational logics of morality’ behind people’s departure from RDP houses in South Africa. We identify three parallel, yet overlapping and partially conflicting conceptions of RDP houses – redress for apartheid, welfare, and freehold assets – that evoke different moral logics towards the role of property titles as well as ways of departure. We then seek to stress how, on the very practical level, operational logics of moralizations work through common denominations such as ‘undeserving’ (Katz, 2013; Romano, 2018) to control the poor beyond the law and, hence, enhance reciprocal dependency despite the inclination of housing policy towards principles of economic liberalism. Beyond such moralizations from above, relatively more present in literature on state housing (Charlton, 2018; Haworth and Manzi, 1999; Marston, 2000), we argue that, interestingly, the same operational logics tend to structure the ways in which recipients, who do not occupy their RDP houses, reject or reframe ‘reciprocal obligations’ (Adloff and Mau, 2006) themselves and, hence, contest but also reproduce moral authority from below.

Thus, what we are concerned with here is less the analysis of the nature of and the ways moralizations around the ‘responsible’ usage of ‘RDP houses’ have emerged (cf. Charlton, 2018; Lemanski, 2011), but rather how they operate in situated practice. Such analytical enquiry into the more experiential dimensions of morality (cf. Bykov, 2019) may allow us to understand how postcolonial housing welfare regimes function through (contested) reciprocal obligations in order to reconcile neoliberal and welfarist logics (cf. Doshi, 2019). Thus, we seek to answer the following research question: How do stakeholders of the RDP housing market encounter, make sense of, and cope with the inherent, yet often ambiguous moral logics of housing provision in their everyday environments and how do they justify selling and letting in a deeply moralized social setting?

To do so, we put into conversation the converging findings of two separate empirical research projects on the experiences and practices of ‘leaving’ RDP housing. From these two studies in extraordinarily moralized social settings, people’s various interactions with moral outrage and contempt have emerged as a dominant theme that deserves concerted attention. Following initial conversations during conferences and online, both authors have engaged in a joint analysis of our interview material, focusing on local stakeholders’ own ways of relating to moralizations around the use of RDP housing. The first author conducted 27 narrative biographical interviews with people who (temporarily) left or were planning to (temporarily) leave their RDP houses. Field research took place together with a female research assistant fluent in different local languages between October 2020 and April 2021 in the entire Gauteng region. The second author conducted in total 23 semi-structured interviews in Lehae, Johannesburg, during March and April 2023, engaging with various stakeholders of the RDP housing market, including recipient-homeowners (12), house purchasers (5), tenants (3), real estate agents (2), and one national government official. Due to the growing concerns within communities about discussing the sale of RDPs, these interviews were not audio recorded. The period in which the interviews were taken place was characterized by multiple crises such as COVID lockdowns, economic stagnation, and rampant inflation, which have influenced people’s decisions and capacities to leave, sell, and let RDP houses.

In the following, we start with a brief outline of three main conceptions of state-subsidized housing in South Africa, grounding the argument in a discussion of the evolution of post-apartheid housing policy. We argue that the plurality of conceptions leads to ambiguous moral logics that could be understood through the notion of reciprocity. Therefore, we then suggest to see free housing provision as a form of gift-giving that evokes different reciprocal expectations who may converge through articulations of how exactly ‘beneficiaries’ should give back. Building on that, we show how in welfare regimes of ‘obligatory reciprocity’ (Adloff and Mau, 2006) policymakers make use of moralizing categorizations such as deserving and undeserving poor to control recipients’ behaviour beyond the law. Finally, we show how recipients themselves relate to moralizations and whether and how they contest the moral logics at play.

State housing in South Africa: An ambiguous plurality of conceptions

With the end of Apartheid in 1994, the housing question appeared as a central concern of South Africa’s post-apartheid political agenda. The decades before, the apartheid state excluded most South Africans classified as ‘Black’ from permanent urban residency, denying them the right to acquire urban land property while providing them with restricted forms of state-sponsored shelter in so-called townships. Because of that, the right to housing was enshrined in section 26 of the new post-apartheid constitution mentioning a legal obligation for the government to ensure all residents have access to adequate housing. Rooted in the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP), the ANC’s major post-apartheid policy framework inspired by the historic Freedom Charter, South Africa’s post-1994 housing policy cannot be detached from its objectives to guarantee freedom, fight exclusion and inequality, and improve living standards for all South Africans. The RDP saw the lack of adequate housing as a direct result of apartheid and called for a mass housing programme to address the challenges associated with apartheid spatial planning. Such ambition of transitional justice and redress was repeatedly re-emphasized by state officials (Huchzermeyer, 2001) like then housing Minister Sisulu, who reaffirmed that ‘it never was the intention of this government to give free homes ad infinitum [. . . ] but to correct the wrongs of the past’ (quoted in Merten, 2014). Likewise, Bank (2023: 177) notes that many RDP house recipients feel that ‘being gifted a house gave them the respect that they had yearned for’.

However, authors such as Huchzermeyer (2001) have argued convincingly that private interests – through the influence of the Urban Foundation, a private sector funded policy think tank – have dominated housing policy formulation in the 1990s, thereby prioritizing a liberal approach to housing policy rather than the progressive ideals of ANC’s Reconstruction and Development Programme. The crucial 1994 White Paper on housing gave preference to individual property ownership, freehold tenure and project-linked capital subsidies. Beneficiaries of the latter receive a completed housing product, typically freestanding and single-storey, usually as part of larger top-down projects at the peripheries. Focusing on standardized delivery while undermining the involvement of local communities, Venter et al. (2015: 356) argue that ‘the housing process in South Africa became technical and business-oriented’. Moreover, Huchzermeyer (2001: 308) criticized that Urban Foundation’s ‘focus on individual freehold titles for the poor was not based on an analysis of the reality or of the experience of poverty’. The housing scheme’s unilateral reliance on individual property ownership cemented the character of state housing as the ‘wobbly pillar of the welfare state’; as a commodity that is integrated into capitalist markets, from which welfare classically should protect (Malpass, 2003).

In 2004, the reformist policy framework BNG (Department of Human Settlements (DHS), 2004), while calling for a wider development of better integrated and sustainable human settlements as a fundamental break with the narrow delivery approach propagated by the White Paper, enhanced a liberal conception of RDP houses as freehold assets. The allocation of freehold title deeds should empower residents, facilitate access to credit, and advance people’s economic opportunities following a value increase of the received housing unit. In contrast to the notion of the ‘passive beneficiary’, BNG policy conceives the house as a valuable ‘asset’ for individual, self-responsible wealth creation of entrepreneurial selves, who lift themselves out of poverty and climb the ‘housing ladder’ (Lemanski, 2011).

However, the transfer of title deeds is often severely delayed and even with title deeds residents without regular employment are unlikely to access finance and to unlock the asset potential of RDP housing as idealized by the BNG (Gordon et al., 2011). In fact, the possible exchange value of RDP houses is likely to be lower than the subsidy and insufficient to bridge the gap to the next market segment and to purchase higher-quality housing (Rust, 2015). The country’s economic crisis as well as racialized lending practises that continue to devaluate properties close to and inside former townships (Migozzi, 2024) have stifled the asset potential of RDP houses. Likewise, the size, modest structural quality, and the peripheral location of most RDP houses give little reason to expect a significant increase of property values. Whereas BNG rightfully pointed at these shortcomings of a housing policy biased towards quantitative delivery, in practice, it did not bring about significant change (Huchzermeyer and Karam, 2016; Pithouse, 2009).

In fact, authors such as Parnell and Pieterse (2010) have argued that it would be misleading to read post-apartheid housing policy through the lens of neoliberalism only. For example, Meth (2020: 160) argues that RDP house recipients do not just perform the role of homeowners, simultaneously they are also conceived as welfare beneficiaries. Likewise, Charlton (2010: 17) shares that some recipients do not consider themselves ordinary property owners. Therefore, Venter et al. (2015) have suggested to conceive RDP houses as both expressions of neoliberal housing policy seeking to support people’s integration into ‘formal’ housing markets and integral part of the state’s post-apartheid welfare approach seeking to improve the situation of low-income citizens.

To obtain an ‘RDP house’ as a once-off welfare support, the government requires applicants to be married or cohabit with a partner, have a dependent, be a South African citizen who is considered ‘contractually capable’, earn less than ZAR 3500, and be a first-time homeowner and state-housing subsidy recipient. As such, eligibility for housing is roughly based on need (lack of means) (Venter et al., 2015) and transforms marginalized citizens into ‘beneficiaries’ that are expected to be grateful for the state’s generous welfare support (Bank, 2023; Meth, 2020). Indeed, political stakeholders, private developers but also recipients themselves have repeatedly stressed the link between housing and an ambitious anti-poverty agenda (Cross, 2013; Huchzermeyer, 2001). However, many scholars such as Bank (2023), Cross (2013), Charlton (2010), and Meth (2020) have raised related doubts whether uniform housing delivery in township-like, mono-functional settlements would contribute to the envisioned reduction of poverty. Moreover, budgetary constraints have slowed down delivery rates of subsidized housing – leaving many eligible households waiting for decades to obtain a house (Oldfield and Greyling, 2015).

We may conclude this section by the basic notion that South Africa’s RDP houses are more than physical structures belonging to individual property owners. Historically grounded, they carry a plurality of ascribed meanings, which we may summarize as three major conceptions: RDP houses are conceived as (1) redress for apartheid, (2) freehold asset, and (3) welfare. These conceptions evoke different, partly contradictory notions of the role of recipients as well as property titles. For example, BNG policy stresses the role of freehold titles to protect and mobilize assets, hence to integrate self-responsible homeowners into formal markets. Eventually, property titles should facilitate residential and social mobility through the housing market. In contrast, property titles may also be seen as important symbols of liberation that stand in sharp contrast to past restrictions to land ownership under apartheid, which forced people into temporary conditions of ‘tolerated’ urban residents. As such, titles should protect from undesired mobility, instead of facilitating mobility. A provincial government official quoted by Charlton (2018: 2171) argued, ‘Remember because of [. . . ] apartheid people never owned a property, so [. . . ] we want people to actually keep these houses [. . . ]’.

Needless to say, such conceptions are not clear-cut, instead they largely overlap and frequently form hybrid notions. However, we argue that the plurality of ascribed meanings towards state housing – even beyond the case of South Africa (e.g. Civelek, 2019; Erman, 2019; Haworth and Manzi, 1999; Marston, 2000) – creates complex, partly diverging moral logics which we suggest to grasp – through the theoretical emphasis of the gift – as (contested) expectations of reciprocity that structure perceptions of morally ‘right’ behaviour towards state-sponsored housing. The notion of reciprocity is not only a useful analytical lens for an understanding of welfare regimes (cf. Adloff and Mau, 2006). It also builds on the gift-like character of free housing provision (cf. Bank, 2023), situated in-between liberal market logics, transitional justice, and the welfare state.

Free housing provision as a gift

Acknowledging that RDP houses are frequently considered ‘gifts’ by both policymakers and eligible population (Bank, 2023), we employ the notion of the gift in a more theoretical way that should allow us to understand moralizations as discursive engagements with recipients’ expected reciprocity, based on the three different conceptions outlined above.

Going back to the classic work of Marcel Mauss, (2002 [1925]), the gift was originally considered to mark an exchange of goods that relies on qualified social relations and potentially strengthens them. Mauss saw the gift economy in contrast to an impersonal, objectified and priced exchange of goods on the market. As opposed to commercial exchange, the exchange of gifts has often been understood as a social activity of high moral value based on humanist logics. Yet, by entering the gift economy, receiver and recipient are creating a bond characterized by reciprocity – which also has a ‘dark side’ (Marcoux, 2009). Godelier (1999) argued that pure gift giving is rather impossible, because, naturally, it creates social expectations to give back. Especially if reciprocity is not balanced (cf. Sahlins, 1972) this is likely to create an asymmetrical relationship between a superior donor that gains prestige and an inferior recipient that is turned into a debtor until the latter gives back. Engaging with Mauss’ seminal work, Fourcade (2020: 212) notes that ‘unlike for commodities, which we can freely part from, gifts are fundamentally inalienable’. This characteristic of gifts contradicts a liberal conception of RDP houses as freehold assets that could be freely traded on the market, just like any other property. Thus, liberal conceptions of state housing – in its pure form – may be read as a rejection of any reciprocal obligations.

Whereas for commercial exchange objectified prices and money nullify reciprocity immediately, reciprocity in the gift economy is typically delayed. Godelier (1999) speaks of the paradox of the gift being both an act of generosity and of subjection that puts the recipient into a persistent position of dependence. Such asymmetrical dependence is strongest if the recipient is unable to give back, as it is typical for hierarchical social situations characterized by lasting imbalances of giving and taking (Adloff and Mau, 2006: 103–104). Such vertical gift giving ‘from above’, Yan (2005: 247) argues, ‘often plays an important role in the formation of political authority and power’. Marcoux (2009: 673) goes as far as arguing that the ‘dark side’ of the gift could not only be used to exert power over people but even oppress them.

Building on that, Adloff and Mau (2006) have argued to reinterpret welfare transfers such as the free provision of RDP houses as a form of asymmetrical gift giving that ties together two unequal parties (‘the generous state’ and ‘the deserving recipient’) upon different conditions of reciprocity that create lasting dependencies. This translates into operational logics of morality that expect the ‘deserving poor’ to adhere to the donator’s reciprocal expectation of a grateful, humble, and responsible use of the gift – very different to ideas of liberal market exchange by means of freehold titles. Such lasting reciprocal relationships may enable the ‘donating’ state to use moralizing dichotomies such as ‘deserving’ vs ‘undeserving poor’ to exert social control even beyond the law (Romano, 2018). Following Fourcade’s (2020) interpretation of Mauss’ The Gift, lasting reciprocal dependencies may only be overcome if one blurs the distinction between ‘givers’ and ‘gifted’, seeing welfare as a sort of ‘collective debt’. Concerning South Africa, this alludes to the conception of RDP houses as a collective redress for the oppression of marginalized people under apartheid, rejecting any further obligation to reciprocate.

However, we may rather observe what Adloff and Mau (2006: 115) describe as ‘obligatory reciprocity’, whereby ‘the acceptance of social assistance obliges the receiver of support to undertake manifest efforts towards overcoming the situation of requiring assistance’. Typically, such logics mark welfare regimes, where operational logics of welfare (desired poverty reduction + redress for apartheid) are closely tied with neoliberal logics (enhanced market integration) – a common feature of postcolonial welfare states (Lavinas, 2013; Venter et al., 2015). Beyond reciprocal expectations of gratitude and political loyalty, obligatory reciprocity involves clear imaginations of ‘how to give back’. Indeed, many South African politicians have voiced precise logics of how housing welfare should work right (cf. Charlton, 2018; Mbatha, 2022). In such contexts of obligatory reciprocity, welfare is not only strictly limited to those with a ‘proven need’, but also should enable (or coerce) recipients to secure an independent, self-responsible market existence.

A typical example are conditional cash transfers (CCT), whereby money is granted only if welfare recipients show conformist behaviour typically targeting enhanced market integration (Lavinas, 2013; Standing, 2011). CCTs are based on the simple presumption that policy makers know what is best for the poor and that the poor need to be nudged to make the ‘right choices’ to integrate into the market – incapable of taking the right decisions for themselves. If CCT recipients do not behave in the ‘right’ way – often claimed to be an effect of weak character (Standing, 2011: 28) – they are considered ‘undeserving’ and face penalties (cf. Romano, 2018). In fact, the state acts against the liberal principle of a freedom of choice and limits people’s agency by obliging them to follow predetermined ways of market integration. Reciprocal dependency is extended and formalized, legitimizing moral authorities (e.g. state representatives) to evaluate how ‘beneficiaries’ use welfare transfers. CCT as an example of obligatory reciprocity therefore illustrates how entrepreneurial logics of the poor as self-responsible agents may converge with logics of public welfare treating the poor as persons in need of state assistance. We argue that such convergence based on obligatory reciprocity tends to be common for postcolonial housing welfare regimes faced by social pressures and unable to meet demand (Harris and Scully, 2015; Levenson, 2017). Indeed, temporary resale bans are typical features of postcolonial housing programmes (Beier, 2025). Its moral logics also address a ‘deserving’ population still waiting for their turn.

Moralizing the non-occupation of RDP houses

RDP housing provision – understood as a welfare policy strongly influenced by neoliberal logics – shares several similarities with CCT, which becomes obvious by zooming in on people who actually sell or let their ‘RDP house’. Following the logics of the freehold asset, selling the house may be a sign of success whereby recipients climb the ‘housing ladder’. In contrast, following the logics of the welfare gift, its disposal appears as an offence that violates lasting moral expectations to show gratitude. To reconcile these ambiguities, the state has added a pre-emptive clause to the National Housing Act (section 10A), which bans the resale of state-subsidized housing and land within the first eight years after transfer. During this period, recipients must offer their RDP house to the provincial government if they wish to dispose of it. Similar to CCT, the conditional nature of housing transfers offends people’s freedom to use their assets the way they like, normally considered to be a distinct feature of freehold titles and neoliberalism. Thus, Mbatha (2022: 17) argues that ‘the existence in policy of both ‘‘housing as an asset” and the “pre-emptive clause” is a contradiction in itself’. Venter et al. (2015: 358) see the pre-emptive clause, together with severe delays in allocating title deeds, as an indicator that BNG’s focus on freehold and the secondary housing market was politically contested. Indeed, the BNG document as well as the recently published new White Paper for Human Settlements (DHS, 2024: 39) have proposed a reduction of the pre-emptive clause, yet so far without effect.

Thus, we argue, it is the pre-emptive clause that – similar to CCT – allows for a convergence of neoliberal and welfarist logics behind housing provision, further specifying the precise logics of ‘how to give back’. As argued above, precise reciprocal expectations are typical characteristics of paternalistic welfare regimes (cf. Mbatha, 2023) that build on obligatory reciprocity. Instead of allowing people to make informed decisions on their own, the poor are considered in need to be guided towards the right decisions. The latter may be best expressed by the statement of a local councillor interviewed by Mbatha (2022: 139): ‘Most of our people are irresponsible. They sell their houses immediately after receiving them. They do this without any alternative accommodation. Their children are bound to suffer again’. In that sense, non-occupation appears to be at odds with the logics of RDP houses as generously gifted welfare offered to deserving citizens, while reflecting liberal concerns with a continuous dependence on the state (Bank, 2023; Beier, 2023; Charlton, 2018). Effectively, it is questioned that people who do not use the house for occupation would be able to find adequate alternative shelter on their own. In other words, non-occupation becomes a major matter of concern if people are expected to move back into informal settlements, where politicians would see them as a burden on the state again (Charlton, 2018: 2713). As a return to informal settlements would thwart the government’s objective to fight informal settlements, such concerns were a prime reason for introducing the pre-emptive clause in 2001 (Lemanski, 2014: 2947). In other words, the pre-emptive clause seeks to address the state’s concerns with its own neoliberal policy principles (freehold, market integration, etc.).

Beyond the law, moralizations of a ‘responsible’ use of housing assets work in the same way and similar to the conditionality of CCT policies. Its inherent operational logics of obligatory reciprocity express themselves through moralizing categorisations from above; such as deserving and undeserving poor. The latter may be seen as a political way to decode moral expectations and ascribe clear responsibilities to welfare recipients admits a complex and ambiguous set of conceptions and policy ambitions (Dieterich et al., in this issue; Romano, 2018). Political stakeholder behind social housing programmes in other rather liberal welfare regimes such as the United Kingdom and Australia have mobilized similar moralizations (Haworth and Manzi, 1999; Marston, 2000). The deserving poor are considered to be in real need without fault of their own and cannot free themselves, whereas the misfortune of the undeserving poor is – in a more biological conception of poverty – considered to be a result of their own moral weakness resulting in bad, yet self-responsible behaviour or a lack of effort (Katz, 2013). Former housing minister Lindiwe Sisulu made explicit use of this distinction by differentiating between those in need for a decent place to live, who are ‘grateful’ for being enabled to reside inside an RDP house and those who ‘she saw as manipulating their housing on the ‘black market’’ (Charlton, 2018: 2173).

Indeed, several policymakers, including high-ranking, have despised people for leaving (selling and renting out) their RDP houses, whether legal or not. Feeling a sense of being insulted and betrayed, they have constructed a publicly circulating image of the imprudent, naïve, irresponsible, if not deviant, hence undeserving beneficiary (Charlton, 2018: 2181). Deputy Minister of Human Settlements, Pamela Tshwete, declared, ‘[Selling and] renting out of houses, is a bad habit that we must collectively address as a matter of urgency’. Such rhetoric does not only reflect biological conceptions of poverty (Katz, 2013) but reinforce logics of welfare paternalism and may address a different audience that expect welfare recipients to adhere to their reciprocal obligations of conformist behaviour. As argued above, South African politicians – as the following formal media statement by a provincial state official suggests – might also address other ‘deserving’ households that have been waiting to receive an RDP house, sometimes for decades:

These houses belong to the needy. We will not allow people to use them for personal profit. It shouldn’t be a tuck shop but rather a home for its rightful beneficiary [. . .]. There are lots of people who are waiting for houses out there! (Desbo Mohono, quoted in RSA, 2010)

Policymakers have even called for an audit to check whether beneficiaries would actually occupy their houses and – similar to CCT – publicly discussed various ways of sanctioning non-occupation beyond moral contempt. They suggested forcing people to occupy their houses or taking back their house, thus questioning the actual validity of freehold titles and, hence, compromising people’s tenure security (Tissington et al., 2010). In July 2016, Lindiwe Sisulu (quoted in Daily Voice, 2016) even speculated about technological innovations as an extreme form of controlling beneficiaries:

We’d be able to ensure that people don’t sell their houses where you’d not need a key to open your house but your eye will [be] a biometric that opens your house so that the possibility of selling it is nil.

Neither were audit results published, nor were such measures implemented. However, the rhetoric of ‘sanctioning’ addresses people who feel themselves to be ‘deserving’, waiting for the state to deliver. In fact, public statements about non-occupation go far beyond the question of what is legal and what is not. Court rules have confirmed that RDP house recipients are free to rent out their house and to dispose of it without transfer even within the 8-year period and even if they make a profit from it [e.g. Nkokheli Jokozela judgement (High Court of South Africa, Eastern Cape Division, 2014 )]. Nonetheless, many policy stakeholders have continued to call various practices of legal non-occupation a deviant practice, thereby creating legal insecurity among recipients of RDP houses – an aspect we will further discuss below. Instead of resorting to the law, which supports a seemingly undesired understanding of the house as a multifunctional and tradable asset, they engage in moral othering and resort to a rhetoric of outrage and contempt ( ‘bad habit’, ‘a matter of urgency’, etc.) to mark what they believe to be morally right or wrong.

However, it would be wrong to say that all policymakers react with moral outrage and contempt to non-occupation. Charlton (2018) notes that some interviewed state representatives, drawing on personal experiences and knowledge, also showed understanding for people that left their RDP houses in order to cope with misfortune, poverty and unemployment. For others, who would sympathize with resellers, they employed the notion of justice. Thabo ¹ , an interviewed official of the SA National Treasury alluded to the difficult role of ‘beneficiary-homeowners’:

When I bought a house there was no clause that prohibited me [to] sell that house for two or three years or whatever years. Why must other people basically be discriminated against [. . .]? I know that they were protecting the poor but I don’t think it’s a positive protection, more from a market point of view.

Acknowledging diverging opinions about non-occupations among state representatives, simultaneously, it is also wrong to argue that merely government officials condemn people for selling or renting out RDP houses. Exemplarily, Kgothatso, an interviewed resident of Johannesburg’s Lehae neighbourhood, precisely reproduced the idea of the undeserving beneficiary, as noted above:

Others [RDP house recipients] sell [their houses] without a plan and go back to the informal settlements. You should go either back home or move to a better place. When we got here, they [public housing recipients] sold them for R180 000 to R250 000 and now it’s [about] R350 000. But those who’ve sold their houses recently have moved back home [to the homelands] which is a better life.

Again, this notion makes clear that the departure from the gifted asset is considered morally appropriate only if households are able to comply with BNG’s narrow idea of asset-driven upward mobility or – in line with the notion of redress for apartheid – if they move ‘back home’ to the countryside. Sales are conceived as morally right only if sellers make use of value increases, which for many remote and marginalized RDP locations is unlikely to happen. The neoliberal logics behind therefore work with a morally charged concept of the actor, who must prove to act responsibly (which means according to neoliberal norms) to be released from its moral obligations. In other words, he is morally free to leave the house if s/he is not perceived as a burden on the state anymore. In the next section, we will now continue to look at how people that sell and rent out RDP houses cope with and challenge such moralizations.

Challenging moral authority from below?

Most people who have left their RDP houses or are considering to do so seem to be aware of the mistrust and moral outrage that accompanies practices of non-occupation – whether they are legal or not. Respondents like Brendan (m, industrial worker), who felt that selling RDP houses was an ordinary phenomenon without any particular moral dimension, seemed to be rather an exceptional case. Indeed, many respondents were hesitant or discouraged by others to talk about their reasons for selling or renting their RDP house. Others like George, a young unemployed seeking to use the rent from his RDP house to finance fun activities during the festive season, did not agree to be recorded. His parents who had passed the house over to him before moving ‘back home’ to Limpopo were disappointed with him renting the house out. For them, renting the house out while staying in a backyard shack was deemed morally inappropriate.

Besides, perceived legal insecurity was the most striking outcome of people’s encounters with moralizations. For example, Xolile, a young female hairdresser, who had inherited an RDP house in Orange Farm, south of Johannesburg, declared that she would only rent out to foreigners without a passport, as they would not dare to denounce her to the local authorities. This was a pragmatic response to rumours that circulated in Orange Farm about distant house owners who had lost their properties to their renters when the latter declared themselves to be the rightful occupants. Likewise, the family of Darren (m, recycler), another respondent from Orange Farm, was concerned about him renting the house to other South Africans: ‘You know there are scams my sister. [. . .] Letting people from South Africa rent out your place is risky. [. . . Government] might confiscate this place from me’.

The possible loss of property was a frequently shared concern. Because of that, Alphonse (m, unemployed) occupied a shack behind his RDP house in Braamfischerville, although his entire family was living in Eldorado Park, some 20 km away. Willing to inhabit his house in the future after his children had finished school, he did not dare to rent it out while staying away in Eldorado Park. Insecurity was also prevalent on the informalized resale market (cf. Mbatha, 2022). Alex, a pensioner who intended to sell his RDP house in Lehae to move back home to the countryside, was concerned about real estate agents that could betray him. Unwilling to resell his house to the state, he felt unprotected on the resale market: ‘They [government officials] said that we can’t move out of our house but what happens if I want to go back home? Must someone else move in for free? I spent my energy applying for this house!’ Here, the house appears as a deserved reward for a tiresome application process.

Although we did not ask respondents explicitly about the public perception of their acts of selling and renting, many felt the desire to share their own justifications why such practices should not be deemed indecent, hence implicitly underlining the power of the operational moral logics at play. Yet, respondents partially challenge the moral authority of the state and the propagated terms of reciprocity. Two dominant ways of doing so may be differentiated: (1) an active affirmation of being a ‘deserving beneficiary’ questioning the state’s capacity to imagine a life in poverty, and (2) an evocation of transitional justice as a foundation of post-apartheid policy objectives. The first is questioning narrow, obligatory imaginations of reciprocity but – loyal to the post-apartheid welfare state – leaves reciprocal hierarchies uncontested. The second rather alludes to the conception of RDP houses as redress, thereby rejecting demands for post-apartheid reciprocity.

Starting with the first, several residents pointed at a mismatch between the state’s expectation to inhabit a poorly constructed house at a peripheral location and the realities of a life in poverty that may force them to weigh up different housing functions (e.g. income vs shelter) against each other (Beier, 2023). From people’s perspectives, logics of poverty turn the state’s moral expectations into something irrational. For example, Sibusiso, an unemployed from Soshanguve near Pretoria, contested the state’s one-sided imagination of how upward mobility should happen:

They should give [RDP houses to] everyone who is not working. [. . . ] Anytime anyone feels like selling his house, must feel so, because you don’t know his situation. Maybe the person sleeps without food [. . . ]. Maybe he can sell the house, go back to the squatter camp, make a small business and then, eventually, he will come back, he will pick up.

Stressing the reasonability of another way of ‘giving back’, Sibusiso addressed the government’s liberal concerns that people would continue to be dependent on welfare assistance if they sell their house. Other respondents like Darren felt urged to stress their gratitude and attachment to the house, arguing that it was only because of the situation that they had to leave the house:

This is a family house, [. . .] where we do our rituals. We are cultural people you know, just that now things are not looking good financially, and there is no money. You see if there was money we were not going to put the house up for renting, so we are doing this to have a source of income. So that l can leave the children with some money.

For people like Darren, the RDP house may be conceived as a social security that could be used to cope with shocks such as unemployment or sickness. In other words: They still felt to be ‘deserving’, would return to the house, and then invest in it. However, the notion of ‘deserving’ was also employed in cases where people did not intend to go back to their RDP houses. In order to highlight that she would not take the house away from a deserving person, Nombulelo (f, hospital worker) stressed that she sold her RDP house to a lady ‘in need’, who lost a leg after a car accident. She would even still look after her. Other resellers explicitly distanced themselves from other sellers, highlighting that their own reasons for leaving were sincere and morally appropriate and hence would not fit the image of the ‘undeserving poor’. For example, Desiree, a general worker whose RDP house was too far from her workplace, stressed that her plan to sell the RDP house was strategic; to save money from transport and then to invest in a bond house that she could choose and design according to her preferences. Although she was living in a rented backyard shack, facing many uncertainties, she was determined that her current situation was only temporary and that she would soon fulfil the state’s expectation to ‘move upwards’. In contrast to her strategic, hence ‘morally legitimate’ move, others would sell to make quick cash: ‘[They] take that money to buy [their] boyfriend a house, then […] he chases [them] away. [… My reason] is different. I’m even sad, because I’m selling my house’. Likewise, Sfiso, a real estate agent from Lehae, used the same antithesis of ‘quick cash’ to navigate moralized space. On the one hand, he stressed the significance of the rather affordable RDP housing market for first-time buyers, on the other he emphasized: ‘I don’t want sellers who want quick buyers. I don’t want problems […]. I take everything to the attorneys, which makes [the] buying or selling [process] take one to three months’.

Compared to the first strategy that rather reproduces moralizing categorisations (Katz, 2013; Romano, 2018), the second strategy tends to challenge moral authority, blurring the boundaries between donors and gifted (Fourcade, 2020). Doing so, respondents mobilize post-apartheid moral logics of transitional justice, emphasizing the wider objectives of empowerment attached to South Africa’s housing policy. They reject reciprocal obligations if the state does not keep up with its post-apartheid promise to empower disadvantaged and formerly oppressed population groups. For example, Ethan, who struggled to pay the service fees for his RDP house in Soshanguve when he lost his employment during the Covid lockdown, was clear about the fact that his current situation would not fit post-apartheid expectations of freedom and progress. He acknowledged that the ANC gave him the opportunity to own property, but he felt that the current situation in his RDP house (incl. high service fees and an undesired location) would block his personal efforts to grow.

Now, everybody has got the right to own property [. . . but] I need an opportunity to grow. This [RDP house] is not giving me an opportunity. [. . . ] It locked me. [. . .] Our municipality pushes you to go back to the life that you don’t want. By force! Cook on the ground, with woods. . . Yeah, because you can’t pay [service fees]. Now if you sell this property you go buy something lower, a little bit lower to this one. At least I can pay rent, [. . .] I can push my business, [. . .] my kids can survive. Unlikely here we’re stuck. Completely we’re at zero here.

There was also wider disillusion with the post-apartheid policies of the state. Some claimed that the government should give priority to other policies instead of pushing an RDP housing programme that could not keep up with its expectations and promises. For Thabiso, a shop employee from Hammanskraal who had to sell his RDP house due to personal circumstances, the very existence of the RDP house was bad, because it meant that the state was not meeting its promises for economic empowerment. Instead of investing in the construction of RDP houses, where people would then be forced to reside with empty stomachs, the state should ‘make sure that most people are employed to be able to generate their own income and survive’. For Thabiso, resales were a direct consequence of a lack of investment in the economic empowerment of black South Africans. Similarly, there was occasional appreciation of the fact that the government’s main priority should not be the provision of ready-made houses. Instead, some respondents pointed at the crucial role of land inequality as a largely unaddressed legacy of apartheid. ‘Remember we blacks own only 5% of the land. You see the new houses they just build one next to another, there’s no land and there won’t be any change’ (Kagiso, m, taxi owner, Soshanguve). For him but also other respondents like Calvin (m, employee, Braamfischerville), the recent priority shift towards the Land Rapid Release programme was right, because land ownership was more important than housing. Disappointed with long waiting lists and state officials that would enrich themselves by selling RDP houses to foreigners, Calvin and Nombulelo claimed land ownership to be the priority of a just post-apartheid housing policy.

Conclusion

The provision of RDP houses has been a key pillar of South Africa’s post-apartheid welfare regime – influenced by neoliberal thought, demands for transitional justice and paternalistic policymaking (Mbatha, 2023; Venter et al., 2015). The resulting multiplicity of meanings ascribed to RDP houses between redress for apartheid, welfare, and freehold asset has created ambiguous if not contradictory moral demands on ‘homeowner-beneficiaries’ (Meth, 2020) – especially on those who (wish to) leave their units. While policy – backed by court rules – has supported the notion of freehold assets that incite homeowners to function as entrepreneurial selves, moralizing media statements of politicians have enhanced reciprocal dependency to control the behaviour of housing recipients beyond the law. Mobilizing moral categorisations such as deserving vs undeserving poor, politicians voice concerns about the morally weak character of recipients (Katz, 2013). The contrasting moral figure of the responsible RDP house owner (one that either occupies the house or leaves the ‘gifted asset’ without becoming a burden on the state again) works to oblige people to adhere to the donator’s narrow expectations of ‘how to give back’. Similar to CCT policies in Latin America (Lavinas, 2013), such moral logics of ‘obligatory reciprocity’ (Adloff and Mau, 2006) should ensure that people conform with the state’s narrow imagination of neoliberal upward mobility.

Yet, in terms of South Africa’s housing programme, we argue that the strong moral denigration of resales and letting, together with the delayed issuing of title deeds, the pre-emptive clause, and wide-spread legal uncertainty, in fact, demonstrate the state’s own reservation about neoliberalism. If freehold titles would allow people to act independently and to participate in (informal) housing markets the state struggles to control, moralizations of a ‘responsible’ use of ‘gifted assets’ extend reciprocal dependency and work against potentially undesired forms of market integration. While neoliberal housing policy tends to be criticized for its failure to meet the demands of the poor (Civelek, 2019; Huchzermeyer, 2001), a welfarist perspective to housing (Doshi, 2019; Venter et al., 2015) may lead us to argue that postcolonial states themselves may opt to work against the liberal principles of their own housing policies. Besides the fear to lose territorial control, the publicly voiced moral denigration of departure from RDP housing may also be seen as a response to social pressure from citizens who have not yet received a house (Harris and Scully, 2015; Levenson, 2017)

Beyond such political intention of moralizations within housing programmes situated in-between welfare and the free market (Haworth and Manzi, 1999; Marston, 2000), our analysis has moved further to stress the everyday-life aspects of morality (Bykov, 2019). Foregrounding perspectives of people who are deemed not to conform with the state’s ideas of a morally appropriate use of housing welfare, allows us to understand the effects of political moralizations on the ground. Such perspective from below may complement an analysis of postcolonial housing welfare regimes (Doshi, 2019; Levenson, 2017), enquiring in how far its foundational reciprocal hierarchies are reproduced or contested from below.

In fact, it seems that operational moral logics of obligatory reciprocity extend beyond policy documents, political speech and the media, but influence moral positioning of welfare recipients. Interestingly, interviewed housing recipients – although none of them had acted against the law – never referred to the legality of their departure (partially an effect of legal insecurity created by moralization). Instead, they felt the need to stress their moral integrity and conformity with reciprocal expectations, reproducing moral categorizations of deserving and undeserving poor. Yet, only few respondents have challenged the state’s unilateral moral authority (cf. Fourcade, 2020), mobilizing a logics of post-apartheid redress that rejects reciprocal obligations unless the state is not actively fulfilling its own promises to achieve transitional justice by improving the lives of formerly oppressed groups. Yet, overall findings suggest that people affected by moral contempt tend to justify their own moral integrity (to themselves and others) by reproducing and stretching rather than contesting the dominant moral logics at play, thereby likely to reinforce reciprocal dependencies and loyalty to the post-apartheid welfare state.