December 5, 2005
"EVICTION gunbattle" blazed the headline across the front page of a recent Saturday Star. Two blocks of flats in Hillbrow had been raided by police (at 2.30 in the morning) to remove residents who had been illegally occupying the flats for the past four years.
In doing so, the police had been shot at and had bottles and rocks thrown at them. Some of the comments in the article were revealing. A young mother said that she had been paying R1 200 a month for the past four years to share a flat with her three sisters.
During the raid, 135 illegal immigrants were arrested. Several firearms were recovered and, ready to be lit and hurled at the police, 25 litres of petrol in bottles. This sounds like Beirut at its worst.
Another press report, in the Sunday Independent of 13 November, states that the City council has, in fact, obtained 60 court interdicts for evictions in the past nine months but that they have not yet been acted upon, so the above scenario could be replayed again and again.
Earlier this year, the Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions, an international human rights non-governmental organisation, published a report called "Any room for the poor?", which dealt with forced evictions in Johannesburg.
It states that about 18 000 households live in "bad buildings" because of the non-availability of decent low-cost housing. The report's profile of the occupants of these buildings is that they are the poorest and most vulnerable residents in the inner city, many performing poorly paid jobs either in the formal sector or subsistence earners in the informal sector.
They live in bad conditions not by choice, but because nothing else is available. Clearly they live in the inner city to be close to sources of employment and to avoid transport costs.
My gripe has been that evictions do not solve the housing problem in the inner city, they exacerbate it. But, at the same time, many of the buildings being occupied are a danger to the health and sometimes even to the lives of the inhabitants. It is a gigantic dichotomy that has to be approached with both sensitivity and with some concrete plan in place.
In the early 1990s the inner city was facing a similar problem when about 12 000 homeless people were living in various communities around the city, in parks and on pavements - in fact on any open space that could be found. A particularly large number lived at Park Station.
The Johannesburg Trust for the Homeless (JTH), which celebrated its tenth anniversary this week, did an analysis of the housing situation at that time and concluded that the major gap in the housing continuum was at the lowest level and that part of this gap might be dealt with through very basic shared accommodation.
The approach it investigated was to accommodate very poor people for a two-year period in what was called "transitional" housing. During this time the JTH would provide training to enable the residents to earn more and move into a higher level of economic activity which, in turn, would enable them to afford better accommodation.
An industrial building was purchased in the south-east of the city in Cornelius Street with donor funding from USAid and the Inner City Housing Upgrading Trust (now the Trust for Urban Housing Finance). The building was altered into predominantly dormitory type accommodation with shared ablution facilities. It still operates today.
Europa Hotel
The "next generation" of such type of accommodation has recently been completed. The Europa Hotel on Wolmarans Street in Hillbrow, like so many of our inner city buildings, has a fascinating history. In 1947, believe it or not, it accommodated Princess Elizabeth, soon to be Queen Elizabeth II.
But in later years it became a haven for strippers, pimps, prostitutes and gangsters and was labelled the "Queen of Sleaze". Its Razmatazz Club was the favourite haunt of the late Brenda Fassie. By 2003 it owed the City arrears of R3-million and was closed and expropriated by the City.
It was transferred to the Better Buildings Programme and the City decided to convert it into transitional and communal housing, but with a provision for emergency shelter.
The management of the building has been entrusted to an organisation known as Madulamoho (Tswane for Communal Living), which was established by the Metropolitan Evangelical Services group and the Johannesburg Trust for the Homeless. These two organisations have a great deal of experience in managing shelters and transitional housing.
People staying in the Europa transitional housing section will only be allowed to stay for 18 months at a cost of R137,50 per bed per month. Those in communal housing can stay indefinitely at a cost of R650 a month. There are also 100 beds for short-term emergencies.
Training in managing finances and the responsibilities of renting will be provided to residents.
Gentrification
Turning now to gentrification - the
Merriam-Webster On Line Dictionary provides this definition of gentrification: "the process of renewal and rebuilding accompanying the influx of middle class or affluent people into deteriorating areas that often displaces earlier, usually poorer, residents".
The term first became popular in England to describe the process of middle class sophisticates taking territory from working class people. Interestingly, in Canada it is evidently referred to as "white painting".
We must be careful that we don't dismiss all change in inner city residential provision as "gentrification" and label it as bad. Disinvestment, neglect, demolition-type "urban renewal" and abandonment, all of which exemplified much of what happened in American cities in the 1950s and 1960s, actually displaced more people than gentrification.
Roberta Grandes Gratz in The Living City says, "Gentrification is primarily a problem in those neighbourhoods where public policy abets accelerated speculation, does little to assist in-place residents to stay and, in fact, encourages the new investor with a variety of incentives but provides no encouragement for in-place residents to stay."
Such short-sighted policy that doesn't apply available stabilisation tools fails to recognise certain realities, he says:
- The displaced don't disappear. The issue of poverty is not addressed. Separated from their institutional anchors, they become rootless and more alienated. They take their poverty with them to other fragile neighbourhoods. It is a debilitating process, both to the individuals on the move and to the neighbourhoods that receive them.
- Displacement cannot be identified simply as a racial issue (this point relates to the US).
- In gentrifying neighbourhoods, the continued presence of low- and moderate-income households obviously doesn't discourage substantial investment by new, often more affluent residents. The absence of adequate City services is more likely to discourage newcomers than the presence of lower-income residents.
- The imbalance between rich and poor neighbourhoods might begin to be addressed if marginal low-income neighbourhoods were viewed as a city asset worthy of attention and public investment, rather than ignored until gentrification takes hold.
- Cost is an unpardonable excuse; first, because in the long run not maintaining low-income neighbourhoods is more costly; second, because the government remains too willing to invest large sums in big, new developments that don't make much sense (I like that); and third, because it is morally unacceptable.
So what tools are available to deal with gentrification? Gratz lists the following:
- Land banking of abandoned housing for designated use;
- Subsidised rehabilitation of government-owned buildings for low-income tenants, tenant management and/or ownership;
- Inclusionary zoning that guarantees provision of low-income units in any project;
- Granny flats that expand the use of old, single-family homes too expensive for the long-term owner to maintain; and
- An antiflip tax imposed on quick property turnovers at spiralling price increases and other creative tax policies that moderate quick turnover and high profit-taking.
The Europa does not fall obviously into any of the above - number two is probably the closest. But the Europa is not going to solve rehousing 18 000 households. We will need a great many Europas and a combination of the tools described above.
To heap this burden on local government also will not be helpful. Hopefully the national Department of Housing's new social housing policy will allow the central and provincial governments to "step up to the plate" as my American friends would say.
If we can spend R20-billion on the Gautrain and R2,5-billion on the provincial government precinct, surely the government owes something to the marginalised citizens of the city.
Regards, Neil
Permission to use web site material
Publishers may use material from this site free of charge, as long as:
- Credit is given to either the "City of Johannesburg website
(www.joburg.org.za)" or to "Johannesburg News Agency
(www.joburg.org.za)";
- If the article is used online, a link is provided to the original
article on this website;
- The name of the article's author is acknowledged;
-
The webmaster is informed of how and where the material is used (fill
in this brief online form).
Johannesburg News Agency is operated by BIG Media at 011-484-1400 |
