The City of Johannesburg has obtained nine court orders declaring privately owned buildings in the inner city unfit for habitation and giving authorities the green light to evacuate and demolish them.
The orders were granted following the Usindiso building fire in Marshalltown last August in which 76 people died, and are part of the city’s plan to upgrade and redevelop the area for safe affordable housing.
Obtaining declaratory orders for hijacked and illegally occupied buildings is a new approach for the city, which said it had previously spent long periods — sometimes years — trying to track down building owners so it could apply for eviction orders.
A declaratory order — which only requires supporting reports from structural engineers and the fire department showing the safety risk — empowers the council to remove occupants on the basis that the building is a danger.
However, the city still needs to find alternative accommodation before it can evacuate residents — a challenge it says it is now working on.
“When it comes to an evacuation, it is a safety concern,” said Zanele Malusi, deputy director of inner city & urban cores in the city’s human settlements department.
“The priority is to get people removed from danger. The advantage [of an evacuation] is that we don’t wait for a property owner to file an eviction application. We can take the matter into our hands and say this is a bad building... We must engage with the occupiers of the building,” she said.
We are really not happy with what the city did to us. The city should just bring prepaid electricity and we will pay. Let them bring Red Ants as they do elsewhere, we will show them flames
— Malusi Lamula
“Usually there is a structural engineer’s report, there is report from the fire department ... the building then gets condemned .... and we can get people evacuated.”
Malusi said after obtaining a declaratory order, the city began an audit process to see who was living in a particular building and what type of housing they qualified for. Just over 2,000 people lived in the nine buildings, making up about 600 households.
“We process them when they are out of the building. We say, ‘You earn more than R3,500 you can go to the affordable rental market.’”
After the nine buildings had been evacuated, they would be demolished and put on the market for development or handed back to the owner.
“The next phase will be to convert them into habitable residential or commercial property. The city will also deal with properties that are not hijacked but where the owner is not complying with building bylaws. The city will give them notice to ensure they adhere to those notices within a time frame.
“The city will also use the precinct approach, where it draws development into a specific area in the inner city to transform the space. The biggest roleplayer in this regard will be private investors. The conversations have started. The city will start using the precinct approach in Marshalltown, where the fire killed 76 people,” Malusi said.
Evacuation of high risk-buildings is part of a broader plan.
City spokesperson Nthatisi Modingoane said among those involved were the city’s group forensic investigations and human settlements sections, the Gauteng government, the department of home affairs, Johannesburg business formations and the inner city partnership forum.
“That document will not just deal with housing. It will address issues of crime, informal trading, waste removal, sewer and water blockages, transport. It is a response to try and put these issues together and see how best we can resolve them,” Modingoane said.
“As we produce that document, it will show what are our quick wins — low-hanging fruit, medium-term goals and long-term goals. By that time we will be able to cost the targets. We are not happy with the current state of the inner city.
“We want to save lives but also improve the living conditions of the people of Johannesburg. We are seeing trends in Randburg and Lenasia of decline in a similar way. The Johannesburg inner city plan one will give us a formula to address the other areas,” Modingoane said.
He said the people living in the nine buildings would be moved once alternative accommodation had been secured.
“The city’s plan is to acquire land parcels that are to be developed for decanting the identified qualifying household.” He said the city has completed the audits of who is in the buildings.
“These buildings were audited in terms of occupancy and affordability. It is not easy to determine the affordability as some individuals refuse to disclose their income. Most of them can, however, afford to pay [rent]. People are advised of low-cost rentals, however there are not many of those to go around.”
Among the nine buildings the city plans to evacuate are Standby and Florence House in Hillbrow.
Modingoane said Florence House was owned by an entity called Learn and Earn Trust and more than R10m was owed in rates and taxes.
Aa few years ago there was a fire in some of the units. The building has water but no electricity. In 2013, the city tried to expropriate the property but its application was opposed.
A resident, Malusi Lamula from Durban, said city officials came to the building two weeks after the Usindiso fire and disconnected the electricity.
“We are really not happy with what the city did to us. Our view is that the city should just bring prepaid electricity and we will pay. Let them bring Red Ants as they do elsewhere, we will show them flames,” he said.
Lamula has lived in the building since he arrived in Johannesburg in 2015. He works as a tour guide.
“We have about 700 people living here. Most of them are not working. We don’t want to be taken to a shelter because people are suffering there. Here we are able to collect our own garbage and clean our building. No-one pays rent here. We live in peace with one another. We don’t understand why the city took our electricity. Now people use paraffin which is a risk for fire. To us, the city is the problem,” Lamula said.
A visit to the building, which is dark inside, showed that many children are among the residents. There is a soup kitchen, which gets food from donors and prepares three meals a day for children in the vicinity.
At Standby, Sipho Mathonsi, 20, said he moved in last year in May after leaving his home in Msinga, KwaZulu-Natal, where he made a girl pregnant. He had been in grade 10 but dropped out of school and came to Johannesburg to try to find a job.
He said no-one pays rent at Standby.
“Life is tough here. The building is unsafe. Most of us living here are not working. I survive by online gambling. On a good day I can get R120 and live off that. We are not here because we like being here, we just don’t have any option,” Mathonsi said.
The Sunday Times visited the building. It is in an appalling state. People empty buckets of faeces into the building’s central atrium. Corridors are laced with cables used for illegal electricity connections and rats rifle through big heaps of garbage on the ground floor.
“I know that if a fire were to start here, we on the second floor will have to jump out of the window because of the mess downstairs,” Mathonsi said.
The municipality claims its efforts to evict tenants in these and other buildings in the inner city is being made difficult by legal challenges by such groups as the Socio-Economic Rights Institute (Seri) in Braamfontein.
Seri attorney Khululiwe Bhengu said part of the organisation’s work was to fight evictions that would lead to homelessness.
“It has been established by the Constitutional Court that if someone is evicted from a place they call home and they risk being homeless after that eviction, then the city has a constitutional obligation to find a temporary shelter where they can stay until they are able to get on their feet,” she said.
Bhengu said people lived in abandoned buildings such as Standby and Florence House because they had no choice.
The Prevention of Illegal Eviction from & Unlawful Occupation of Land Act required courts to consider who was being evicted before issuing an eviction order, she said. The city had an obligation to provide alternative accommodation whether the eviction was being carried out by the city or a private entity.
“The city needs to file a report which says ‘these are the people who live in that building and this is where the city will take them’ and when it will do so.
The city needs to file a report which says ‘these are the people who live in that building and this is where the city will take them’ and when it will do so
— Seri attorney Khululiwe Bhengu
“I’ve got about six cases pending in the Johannesburg high court because the city is not filing that report. Each court sitting with an eviction must know who they are evicting.”
Seri files its own reports profiling people in danger of eviction.
“This includes their background, how they got to live in the building and how much they earn. The report will also include the background of what the building was used for before being illegally occupied,” Bhengu said.
She said department of human settlements rules outlined alternative accommodation requirements. Among them was that the accommodation must be 24m² or bigger.
“At Denver [where the survivors of Usindiso fire have been accommodated] they have 9m². It falls short of what the code requires from the city.”
She said case law had established that temporary shelters must have water and sanitation.
“The city thinks it can wish these people away. That is a problem with every political party which has tried to address the situation in the inner city.”
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