[PUBLICATION] SERI launches new research briefs on women’s access to rental housing and property rights in inner-city Johannesburg (7 May 2026).

On Thursday, 7 May 2026, SERI launched two new research briefs in our series examining land and housing through a women’s equality lens. This research briefs focus on women’s access to rental housing in inner-city Johannesburg, as well as their access to South Africa’s formal system of registered property.

The first series on Access to formal property: title deeds and sales in execution provides an overview of South Africa’s registered property system, focusing on the historical, legal, and structural barriers that continue to shape women’s access to secure tenure. The registered property system refers broadly to formal, legally recognised tenure arrangements recorded in the national deeds registry, in contrast to the informal “off-register” systems many women still rely on. It includes individual ownership, but is not limited to it.

Because colonial and apartheid legislation entrenched gendered, racialised, and class-based exclusion from land and housing, women—particularly Black women—continue to face significant obstacles in obtaining and retaining registered property. These inequalities persist despite post-apartheid reforms aimed at expanding access to land, protecting against arbitrary deprivation, and redressing past dispossession.

This research brief outlines the historical context that produced today’s inequities, tracing how pre-apartheid colonial laws, apartheid-era legislation, and post-1994 reforms collectively shaped the registered property system and continue to influence women’s access to land, housing, and secure tenure.

The second series on Rental Accommodation in the Inner City of Johannesburg examines rental disputes in South Africa and the ways in which conflict between landlords and tenants is produced, managed, and resolved within the rental housing system. Rental disputes often arise from insecure tenure, informal agreements, unaffordable rent, poor living conditions, and power imbalances between parties. While dispute-resolution mechanisms exist in law, many tenants, particularly women, struggle to access effective remedies in practice. As a result, many renters, or their community based organisations, have developed a range of local dispute resolution practices.

Drawing on legal frameworks, selected case examples, and lived experiences, this research highlights how rental disputes are shaped by structural inequality and how they disproportionately affect women, who are more likely to be responsible for households, face informal leasing arrangements, and experience heightened risks of eviction and harassment. It situates rental disputes within the broader context of a constrained and unequal rental market. The case examples and lived experiences material is drawn primarily from the inner city Johannesburg context.