Readers are welcome to reproduce and reference this article as long as appropriate acknowledgments are given. With over three million people living in shacks or inadequate housing and with tens of thousands joining the ranks of the homeless every year, it could be decades before an acceptable level of housing for all South Africans is reached. Adding to this crisis is a growing number of legal and undocumented migrants from other parts of the continent. Legal border crossings alone have increased fourfold since 1990 while the number of undocumented border crossings would appear to have increased dramatically.
Many migrants are poor and in search of employment and housing in urban areas.
This has the potential to add significant pressure on limited housing resources in South African cities. Three informal and township communities from the Cape Town area served as case studies for this research and provided us with a concrete, albeit geographically limited, perspective on this important and politically sensitive policy area. The first major finding of the study is that there are no clear policies on access to housing for non-citizens in South Africa. Interestingly, there were no significant differences in attitude across age, gender, income or other important demographic variables, making it virtually impossible to develop any kind of attitudinal profile. There was, however, a marked absence of xenophobic comments about foreigners, challenging the popularly held belief that South African citizens are taking an increasingly antagonistic attitude to migrants of African origin.