Arcadia, Tshwane · Social Housing
Thusanang, Leyds Street
What this story helps churches see
Small church-housing projects, repeated across a city, can quietly accumulate into something significant.
The Leyds Street Congregational Church in Arcadia, Tshwane, gave a portion of its site to Yeast City Housing for the development of Thusanang — eleven self-contained and ten communal housing units, plus a community hall and shared facilities, designed to provide secure housing for women and children. The courtyard at the centre of the development is built around an indigenous tree.
The Leyds Street Congregational Church sits in Arcadia, an inner-city neighbourhood in Tshwane that holds the rhythms of an older suburb beside the pressures of an active city centre. Like many inner-city congregations, the church found itself with land it was not fully using and a neighbourhood that was using everything it had.
The decision the church made was the same one taken — in different forms — by the Methodist church a few blocks away at Living Stones, and by the Christian Reformed Church in Salvokop. It made part of its site available for housing.
The process
The partnership was with Yeast City Housing, a Christian housing company that has spent the last twenty years developing affordable housing in inner-city Tshwane in creative partnerships with churches. As with Living Stones, the title to the underlying land remains with the congregation; the development sits on a portion of the site allocated for housing and shared use.
The project was named Thusanang — a Sotho word that translates roughly as help one another.
What was built
The development holds:
- 11 self-contained housing units.
- 10 communal housing units.
- A community hall.
- Facilities designed to support vulnerable families and to provide secure housing for women and children.
The total project value was R4,621,701 at the time of completion.
Two design choices are worth flagging. The first is the unit mix: a deliberate combination of self-contained and communal accommodation, recognising that different residents at different stages need different kinds of housing. The second is the courtyard, built around an indigenous tree, designed to encourage the kind of casual encounter that turns a building into a community.
What they learned
Thusanang sits in the same inner-city Tshwane ecosystem as Living Stones. Read together, the two projects show what a city begins to look like when several congregations make different parts of their property available for housing in coordinated ways.
The lesson is structural: a city is not transformed by one large church-housing project. It is transformed by many small ones, in partnership with the same trusted developer, in the same neighbourhood, over twenty years. Twenty-one units at Thusanang. Twenty-seven at Living Stones. Eighty-eight at Inkululeko. Each project, on its own, is modest. Together — and with a partner like Yeast City Housing holding them — they are a quietly accumulating answer to what church land in inner-city Tshwane is for.
Sources
- Yeast City Housing, Thusanang project page.
Continue your discernment