ARTICLE Reframing the ‘gap market’: lessons and implications from Cape Town’s gap market housing initiative Liza Rose Cirolia 1 Received: 10 December 2014 / Accepted: 7 October 2015 Ó Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015 Abstract In South Africa, households which earn too much to qualify for South Africa’s impressive capital subsidy programme and too little to access mortgage finance are referred to as the gap market. As the gap continues to grow, address is of increasing policy priority, a focus of local and national efforts. However, this paper argues that the gap market has been misunderstood and inappropriately framed in South African housing policy discourse. The case study of the City of Cape Town’s ‘Sale of Serviced Erven for GAP Market Purposes’ demonstrates the assumption that the gap market is a functional housing sub- market which can be targeted uniformly. This paper argues that the gap market is instead a derivative of South Africa’s housing policy history and premised on the problematic ‘ownership imperative’. While the gap market is a useful conceptual tool to be understood within its historic trajectory, it should be discarded from policy design processes and replaced with more useful categories driven by analysis of the households and dynamics which comprise the market. This argument is relevant for all countries which seek to address gaps in their housing markets. Keywords Cape Town Á Gap market Á Housing policy Á Housing markets Á South Africa 1 Introduction Housing ownership is an important part of South African policy and society. In this regard, state-led housing provision has been instrumental in post-apartheid South Africa. Since the advent of democracy in 1994, the state has provided over three million units to households & Liza Rose Cirolia lizacirolia@gmail.com; http://www.africancentreforcities.net 1 African Centre for Cities, University of Cape Town, Upper Campus, Room 2.13, Shell Environmental and Geographical Science Building, Pvt Bag X3, Rondebosch 7701, South Africa 123 J Hous and the Built Environ DOI 10.1007/s10901-015-9482-1