I come from a long line of ordinary South Africans, the kind of people this country runs on, working-class people who never expected shortcuts, only the chance to build something a little sturdier for the next generation.
When I was very young – too young to remember – times were particularly tough. There is a story my parents used to tell about the night when, with barely anything else left in the kitchen, they mixed a little custard powder with water for me and my brother to share. There was nothing else to eat; each other’s company was all that my parents had to share.
I never went to bed hungry as a child, but I do remember hand-me-downs, power cuts, and hearing my mom waking early for a job she never liked but never left, because it paid the bills.
I went on to finish school. I went to university. I graduated. But none of this happened by accident. It all happened because of something we don’t talk about enough in this country: mobility.
The South African dream
When we talk about social mobility, we’re really talking about what is commonly known as the American Dream, but in our case, it’s the South African dream. It’s the belief that through hard work and perseverance, your children can do better than you did, that they’ll go further, live more securely, and have more opportunities than you ever had.
Many factors shape social mobility – far more than we can thoroughly cover here – but it is common to think of social mobility in two broad stages. The first stage is early life: the circumstances you are born into, such as your family environment, access to schooling, and the community you grow up in. The second stage begins once you enter the workforce, where your trajectory is increasingly shaped by the broader economy, things like job opportunities, access to credit, inflation, and the ability to acquire assets.
These two stages constantly influence one another. Your early environment affects your chances later in life, and the structure of the economy can either reinforce or offset those formative conditions. For now, though, the focus is on that second stage, because that is where a government’s policy decisions can have an immediate and visible impact.
If the dream is for each generation to start a little further ahead, then few things matter more than what you are able to pass on. And that is where property rights come in. When a family owns an asset that can be inherited by children and grandchildren, it gives the next generation a tangible economic head-start. As colleague Makone Maja, IRR Strategic Engagements Manager, puts it, secure title deeds turn property into a “legacy-generating” asset that lives on, long after the hard work is done.
But in South Africa, that starting point is becoming blurry – where property rights are increasingly insecure, and informal, the value cannot be protected, let alone transferred. Worse, what should be a source of stability risks being tied up in legal disputes and left vulnerable to state interference.
It’s easy to nod along with these ideas, but harder to show their impact in practice. After all, families who own property usually differ from those who don’t – in income, education, and so on. So how do we isolate the effect of ownership itself? One of the clearest examples comes from a case study in Argentina.
Lessons from Argentina
In 1981, a group of squatters occupied a piece of wasteland in San Francisco Solano, a low-income area just outside the Argentinian capital of Buenos Aires. These were organised groups of citizens working with a local Catholic chapel. To avoid creating a shantytown, they divided the land into small orderly plots. Initially, they believed the land was owned by the state, but it belonged to private landowners.
Three years later, in 1984, the Argentine government passed legislation to expropriate the land and formally grant titles to the families who had built their homes there. However, because some of the original owners accepted compensation and others challenged it in court, it created a natural divide. Some families received formal title deeds quickly, while others continued living on the land with only informal usufructuary rights. They were able to live there without paying rent or taxes, but unable to sell, upgrade legally, or know if they’d one day be evicted.
This uneven, essentially random, rollout created a rare natural experiment, with two groups: a “treatment group” with full ownership, and a “control group” stuck in limbo. This allowed researchers to study the effects of property rights by comparing similar households living in near proximity under different legal conditions.
In their paper, Property Rights for the Poor: Effects of Land Titling, economists Sebastian Galiani and Ernesto Schargrodsky detailed the findings, following two surveys of the families in this Argentine settlement, in 2003 and 2007.
Among the most interesting findings was that families who received secure titles significantly improved their housing conditions. They expanded their homes by about 12% on average, upgraded their building materials, and housing quality rose by an estimated 37%. The goal of these improvements was not superficial. Ownership raised the economic return on their investments, so people were more willing to put money and effort into something they knew they could keep, and pass on.
Over time, families in the “treatment group” experienced notable differences in household structure and human capital. These homes were less overcrowded, but, more importantly, their children stayed in school for longer. On average, they completed 0.69 more years of education, with secondary school completion rates twice as high as those of neighbours in the “control group” – 53% versus 26%. These outcomes suggest that secure property allowed parents to plan for the future by having fewer children and investing in each child’s education.
The families in Argentina’s experiment proved what many South Africans already feel in their bones: When I know I own my home, I can stop thinking about survival and start building something better. But the opposite is also true: When my rights are unclear or contested, I hesitate and the dream stalls.
That’s why it matters what kind of system we build. The Expropriation Act of 2025 threatens the security and stability working-class families rely on to build a better future for their children. If families cannot confidently own their homes or invest in assets, they lose one of the most effective tools of upward mobility.
The constructive alternative
Recognising this threat, the Institute of Race Relations has introduced the Right to Own Bill as a pragmatic answer to the increasing infringement of property rights as human rights. The bill addresses the main obstacles to mobility in the following ways:
- It provides for the formal recognition and surveying of informal neighbourhoods to integrate them into the formal land registry (with a digital land record database as a matter of priority). Formalising these settlements will protect the residents from arbitrary eviction and encourage home improvements once land rights are secured. This is coupled with directing infrastructure development to these areas. Better roads, and formalised electricity and water networks will raise property values and the quality of life of communities;
- South Africa has a vast title-deed backlog with millions of people who have lived without title deeds for a long time. The bill mandates that this must be dealt with by rapidly issuing title deeds to qualifying occupants of RDP housing and other public housing, townships, and informal settlements;
- It repeals conflicting provisions of the Expropriation Act and insists on market-value compensation for any expropriation;
- It introduces a housing voucher system to help low-income households to build or upgrade their homes;
- It provides for underutilised land to be redistributed through a market-driven process, and
- It establishes a Special Directorate within the National Prosecuting Authority to prosecute and prevent unlawful seizures of land.
At the centre of the IRR’s proposed law is a hard-headed recognition that weak property rights are a brake on mobility. But at the heart of the bill is something more human. It’s about the longing to build a life that outlasts you. That is what the Right to Own Bill sets out to protect for every South African who still dreams.
The custard story of my early childhood isn’t about a bad night in a broke kitchen. It is about two people who, despite their immediate circumstances, had built just enough stability to believe their tomorrow might be better. Part of that stability came from having a title deed that no one could take away. And that is the part we so easily miss. Yes, it is about moving forward and upward, but it is first about knowing that the ground beneath you won’t suddenly give way.
[Image: Oleksandr Pidvalnyi from Pixabay]
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