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Adequate housing undergirds all social and economic relations, connecting communities with other related services that are key for people’s optimum development. It is a key social welfare service and a basic human need whose empowerment function resonates with the social work agenda of enabling smooth functioning of the society and creating socially and economically viable communities. In this article, I report on the housing experiences of social housing beneficiaries in the Gauteng province of South Africa. Using an empowerment lens, I contend that housing has the potential to give people more control and self-determination over their lives by linking them to the economy. I employed purposive sampling in this qualitative study and selected three social housing institutions: two in Johannesburg and one in Pretoria. In each of these institutions a focus group discussion was conducted with the beneficiaries. The research findings indicate that adequate housing delivery bears numerous empowerment dividends, directly helping poor people to break from a cycle of poverty. Consonant with its mandate of empowering communities, social work needs to be more proactive in housing advocacy on behalf of poor people and marginalised individuals and groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This article explores racial desegregation in a government managed village for low-income families in Pietermaritzburg. At first glance Oribi village seems to offer an alternative model of racial desegregation based on state management rather than individual choice in the market-place. Oribi has undergone significant change in racial demography since 1994 with little evidence of racial succession, white flight, infilling or mixed densification. This amounts to a process of racial desegregation in spatial, but perhaps also social, terms. Further, this is a process of desegregation ostensibly driven by the state for the public good. However, closer investigation revealed this alternative model to be a chimera, with the state relinquishing much control to market-related forces. Ironically, the spatial desegregation of Oribi from 1996 to 2003 was the unintended outcome of two racialised means of access. While same poor white families were placed by the state, many better-off black families bought their way in through informal networks. This racialisation of access was mirrored in racialised attitudes towards desegregation in the village. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]