AREAS ACT
Drew Forrest
AN inner-city housing specialist has warned that the tough official line on illegal immigrants is hampering the regeneration of South Africa’s urban slums.
Carien Engelbrecht, Planact’s housing co-ordinator and former legal adviser to the South African National Civics Organisation, sees a parallel in the effects of the Group Areas Act on the Johannesburg inner city in the 1980s. Black residents of suburbs like Hillbrow and Joubert Park, permanently vulnerable to eviction by the police, were afraid to complain about or organise against deteriorating conditions. This in turn exposed them to “super-exploitation” by rack-renting landlords.
Illegal immigrants — who she estimates now comprise between 10 and 30 percent of Johannesburg’s inner-city residents — have also been forced into the shadows by state policy, Engelbrecht says. The result has been high levels of overcrowding and rentals of up to R800 a month for a single bedroom.
“The solution does not lie in exclusion, but in assimilation,” Engelbrecht recently told a high-level construction conference at Midrand.
“State policy in relation to illegal immigrants is extremely hostile. Even the simplest contractual arrangement for the purchase of vegetables from a hawker is not only void but criminal.”
Engelbrecht called for the decriminalisation of transactions by illegal immigrants in relation to rental accommodation and trading. This did not mean they would have access to state subsidies or services, and their right to own property could be restricted.