Commercial property association Sapoa says it and the national housing department have agreed on a joint working relationship to tackle problems surrounding housing delivery, infrastructure and the backlog in rezoning applications.

Incoming CEO Neil Gopal and president TC Chetty met Housing Minister Lindiwe Sisulu on Monday to discuss these and other issues.

"That meeting went very well," says Gopal.

The meeting also "touched on" issues surrounding golf estates. "We agreed that an integrated approach to development was needed in order to address the development backlog in the country, particularly housing shortages," says Gopal.

Golf estates were in the headlines at the weekend after President Thabo Mbeki slammed housing development strategies that favoured the rich, such as gated communities and golf estates, saying they perpetuated apartheid settlement patterns.

Speaking on Friday at the mixed-income Brickfields residential development project in Newtown, Johannesburg, Mbeki said golfing estates perpetuated settlement patterns along racial, gender and class divisions.

He said an urgent challenge was to stop housing development strategies that ensure that the best-located land close to all the best facilities was always available to the rich. He said the poor were condemned to dusty semideveloped land far from modern infrastructure.

Gopal and Chetty say Sapoa’s view is that there should be a more "integrated approach" to the development of golf estates.

"We don’t want to perpetuate the apartheid planning models where developments take place on the periphery of the city," says Gopal. He says when developers look at golf estates they have to look at what "other opportunities" they can create such as affordable housing.

"Our approach is not anti-golf estates but we can’t have golf estates wall to wall," says Chetty. Gopal and Chetty say that there is a need for good integrated planning on the part of local government authorities and developers.

"It’s about ensuring that whatever is developed is sustainable. Let’s not just build golf courses for the sake of building golf courses. Developers should do their feasibility studies," they say.