Private property owners are responsible for 75% of eThekwini metro’s dilapidated inner-city buildings, according to eThekwini municipality, including hijacked highrises and heritage sites, and the city is enforcing compliance through the courts and supporting efforts to expedite renovations.
The metro’s plans to eradicate the bad buildings problem was raised at a public meeting at the Durban City Hall this month.
The deputy head of the city’s development planning department, Sbusiso Ndebele, said work had been done to revamp buildings such as the Mahatma Gandhi Road precinct, Marine Parade, Warwick Junction and Albert Park.
He said in terms of the problem building by-law, bad buildings were those that are “derelict or showing signs of becoming unhealthy, unsanitary, unsightly or objectionable” and that appear to have been abandoned by the owner. These are also often overcrowded, illegally occupied, structurally unsound, have been hijacked or are associated with criminal activities.
“If we want investors to come back to the city, one of the issues we have to deal with is the eradication of bad buildings,” Ndebele said.
The planning department has divided the inner city into six areas, focusing on the City Ports and Mahatma Gandhi precincts, where the bulk of these buildings are located among the developments taking place along the waterfront, the city’s prime tourism area.
Ndebele said 75%, or 65 of the 86 problem buildings are privately owned, while the balance are owned by either local, provincial or national government. Nine of the city’s 16 hijacked buildings belong to the state. It owns 10 buildings identified as highly unsafe, five that post a medium risk and six with low risk.
“So, we are not leading by example. When it comes to maintenance, the municipality also has a role to play to ensure enforcement to stop normal buildings getting to bad building status,” he said.
Ndelebe said the city had adopted a “carrot and stick” approach that includes encouraging owners to refurbish buildings by fast tracking building plans and reducing application fees; increasing property rates charges; prosecuting owners and applying for demolition orders. In many cases, property owners had agreed to cooperate with the city to fix their buildings.
The city was also exploring the possibility of converting some buildings to social housing for young people.
Since 2019, 22 buildings have been refurbished after the city enforced compliance, while nine have been demolished and 13 hijacked buildings are back under control of the owners, Ndebele said.
eThekwini metro’s catalytic projects programme manager, Kamalen Gounden, said plans to repurpose the Post Office may include office or recreational uses but this would only be decided once the city had acquired the building. A letter has been sent to the business rescue practitioners asking whether they were amenable to selling the property.
Some civil society organisations and architects at last week’s public meeting said they had been struggling to speak to the city about getting involved in fixing problem buildings.
Zainul Aberdeen, a representative of the Warwick historical committee, said it had tried for eight years to obtain a lease to develop a museum in the Warwick Precinct, where political activists Fathima and Dawood Seedat had lived. Dawood joined 155 others, including Chief Albert Luthuli and Nelson Mandela, in the dock for the Treason Trial in 1956. The family was forcefully removed and settled in Phoenix, north of Durban.
“The Warwick historical committee has been trying to rent a dilapidated building since 2015. The house has dilapidated considerably and there is even a shack settlement that has come up. They are willing to invest but the process is going on and on, and all the city says is that they are working on it,” Aberdeen said.
University of KwaZulu-Natal academic Viloshin Govender said professionals had been wanting to work with the municipality to fix “bad buildings” and criticised it for sharing outdated information.
“You are sharing interventions that are 10 years old,” he said.