‘Streets better than bad houses’

The Supreme Court of Appeal has given the City of Johannesburg a week to detail its plans to house 200 people it wants to evict from the inner city’s ‘bad” buildings. The court ordered the municipality to produce an affidavit in seven days.

It was responding to the council’s appeal against a Johannesburg High Court ruling in March last year, which dismissed applications to evict because no alternative accommodation had been provided.

During the appeal, heard on Tuesday, Judge Louis Harms pressed the counsel for the city, Fanie du Plessis, to provide details of Johannesburg’s application for a subsidy from the Gauteng government for temporary alternative housing. Du Plessis was unable to do so.

Under its Better Buildings Programme, the municipality had set out to remove about 300 residents from six inner-city buildings, including four houses in Joel Street, a high-rise block of flats in Berea called San Jose and a disused panel-beating workshop in Main Street.

However, the city did not seek to evict squatters from dilapidated Joel Street houses, saying conditions there had improved. It hinted that its primary concern was to further the Better Buldings Programme by refurbishing badly managed, mostly high-rise buildings and renting them out.

According to the Centre for Applied Legal Studies, which is supporting the residents’ court action, about 67 000 people live in decaying buildings in the inner city. The council has listed about 170 ‘bad” buildings, most of which have been abandoned by their proprietors.

The Supreme Court of Appeal’s request for facts suggested the court is concerned about the constitutional requirement of housing for the poor.

Mayoral committee member for development planning and urban management Ruby Mathang said the council believed inhabitants of derelict buildings ‘are better off in the street, where they only might die” than ‘in bad buildings where they will die”. Mathang said the municipality was planning to make buildings available for evicted residents as an interim measure. He would not elaborate because the Supreme Court of Appeal still had to rule on the municipality’s proposals.

Du Plessis told the court that Johannesburg did not have the money to provide alternative housing.

According to the Auditor General’s report on Johannesburg’s finances last year, the city had an accounting surplus of R1,5-billion for the 2004/05 financial year. However, Mathang said this did not represent money in the bank, but was an ‘accounting entry for the balance sheet through national fiscus”.

Stuart Wilson, a researcher at the Centre for Applied Legal Studies, said the Constitution required the city to prove that it did not have the funds to provide alternative shelter for displaced inner-city residents. ‘The occupiers just have to prove that they [the city] have the legal obligation to provide substitute shelter.”

A strong precedent exists in the ‘Grootboom case” of 1998, brought by about 900 residents of Wallacedene to protest against their 1998 eviction from private land earmarked for low-cost housing in the Western Cape. The Constitutional Court ruled in 2000 that the City of Cape Town’s housing policy was reasonable, but that it had failed to take into account people in desperate need and therefore failed to discharge its constitutional duty.

Cape Town has since developed a comprehensive housing plan that has seen the residents of Wallacedene receive housing.