Neil Fraser
November 11, 2002
Out of a number of significant events in the life of the city this week, two issues focused my mind on the urban poor.
The first issue was the AGM of the Johannesburg Trust for the Homeless (JTH) which was held in Cornelius House. The second was the opening of the CIDA City Campus which I'll cover next week.
The other 'significant' events were the approval by the Inner City Committee of the Spatial Framework for the Braamfontein Regeneration Project; and a report at our monthly Business Coalition meeting by one of the members that 20 000 square metres of Grade A office space has been let over the past four months - the new tenants are from 'out of town'. Yeah!
Back to the JTH and Cornelius House. For a number of years after the CJP was established in 1992, our work focused on the reasons for the decline in the inner city and investigating possible solutions.
One of the issues that we established early on was that, in comparison to cities in developed countries, we suffered from a distinct lack of intermediaries of all types. For instance, when we looked at residential accommodation in the United States we found that literally dozens of organisations had developed in that country to support a whole range of aspects of the provision of housing at all levels.
In comparison, we literally had the standard financial institutions; in fact we were experiencing the disappearance of the traditional 'building society' as they were being absorbed into the banking industry, and little else.
There was no Johannesburg Housing Company, COPE, Social Housing Foundation, National Housing Finance Corporation, or Nurcha, all of which became subsequent responses to the lack of any sophisticated models in the marketplace.
We decided that part of our work should therefore be to introduce organisations that could concentrate on specific aspects of market failure or its absence.
Two of the first such organisations that we established were ICHUT, the Inner City Housing Upgrading Trust and the JTH. The latter was conceived originally as a coordinating body for all the disparate players in the homeless field at that time.
ICHUT was originally conceived as an intermediary to assist disadvantaged individuals to obtain housing in the inner city. We believed that this would start to provide some stabilisation in the housing market and in the inner city itself.
At that time, in the early 1990s there was also a very visible problem regarding homelessness - at one stage there were about 6 000 homeless people in the CBD itself, thousands of whom were living at Park Station. The CBD was dotted with communities that had set themselves up in rudimentary shelters on pavements, parks and abandoned buildings.
The CJP, through an analysis of the provision of housing in the early '90s also determined that in the continuum of the provision of housing, from homelessness at one end to affordable housing at the other, there were serious gaps: two of these were the provision of social housing and some form of housing to bridge the gap between traditional shelters and social housing.
We thought that the gap could be filled with 'transitional housing', examples of which we had seen in the USA, so the JTH set about establishing a local model. Cornelius House was the result.
The building is situated on the south-eastern edge of the inner city in a mainly older industrial/warehousing environment. It was an industrial building with a fairly large floor plate, ground floor plus four storeys.
With funding from ICHUT and USAID, the Trust purchased the building and created quality communal accommodation on floors 1 to 3. The ground floor was kept as training space but there were insufficient funds to do anything with the fourth floor at the time.
The accommodation consists of single and double rooms with communal bathroom facilities and a large communal kitchen.
Managing the building was a steep learning curve for Chris Lund, the Chief Executive of the JTH. Today the building has settled into a well-run facility.
For the first three years the building ran at a loss, but with the completion of additional accommodation on the fourth level this year, the building is now breaking even.
The rooms on the fourth floor are larger than on the other levels, offering family accommodation. The range of rentals is R165 per month ($16 currently!) for a single room or for a double room for husband/wife; R330 for two same sex persons sharing a double room whilst the family rooms cost around R450 to R550 per month. The economics of the building rely, of course, on assistance from the local authority in the form of rates rebates.
The building now boasts a successful spaza shop, a hairdresser, a tailor, and offers a variety of training opportunities for residents.
Twice a year a Quantas crew give up their free time in the city to work at the building helping to clean or providing training especially related to catering.
One of the objectives of the Trust is to provide training to the occupiers so that they might find employment or improve their employment opportunities and eventually move on to better quality accommodation.
This is what urban renewal is all about - trying to understand the issues on the ground - developing relevant responses, implementing initiatives and being prepared to learn through trial and error.
Yet I can't help but wonder if our focus hasn't resulted in a blind spot developing in relation to the urban poor. The urban poor constitute a huge dichotomy and practical difficulty for which we don't appear to have developed a specific plan.
We have thousands of people living in unacceptable and often unsafe conditions in the inner city, which impacts negatively on their quality of life and also negatively on the fabric of the city itself.
We have to find suitable accommodation for them without removing them from the opportunities that only a city can offer. It is a huge problem because they constitute the poorest sector of our community.
Let me quantify the size of the problem. The 'Joburg 2030' report estimates our metropolitan population at 2 million 900 people. But it also reveals that 33 percent of our population is housed in what is termed 'less than adequate accommodation', but percentages hide the real figures as that translates to just under a million people.
The report also states that 14.8 percent of households live in informal settlements, which translates to nearly half a million people and another 13.6 percent, representing nearly another half a million households, are located in backyard shacks.
Another recent report states that we have 954.605 persons in employment in the metro but that nearly half that figure or 400 000 potentially economic active people, are unemployed.
Whilst these figures relate to the metro area, they do not include the huge numbers of 'illegal' immigrants who live in the inner city - I wouldn't be surprised if the inner city figures alone are not close to the 'official' metro figures!
'Joburg 2030' has the following as one of the tenets or elements of its long-term strategy: "The starting premise is that a better city and a better quality of life for its citizens is fundamentally based on the ability of the city's economy to grow."
There can be no argument with that statement. My concern though, is how the poorest of the poor and that huge number of unemployed people are being specifically addressed or are they just being by-passed on the basis that as our economy grows they will be absorbed into the system.
If so, what about their lack of skills? The late Dan Sweat, who ran a city organisation in Atlanta, once said that if cities failed to deal constructively with the urban poor, the urban poor would deal destructively with cities. He didn't mean this as an aggressive response but as a natural consequence and we certainly experience that in Johannesburg.
I believe that we have 'turned the corner' or 'come off the bottom' in terms of urban regeneration. Our challenge, as the process of change accelerates, must now be to address, with the same vigour that we addressed the regeneration of the city, the extremely difficult but critical issue of preparing the urban poor so that they can be absorbed into the economy.
That preparation must deal with the issue of appropriate shelter and appropriate skills if we are to succeed. If this isn't done, then we will marginalise the urban poor even more and the revitalisation of the inner city will be incomplete. We need a plan, a BIG and BOLD plan!
