Barry Streek
Many prominent Cape Town companies still own dismal hostels in the city’s townships and are hindering the redevelopment plans of the city council.
Thousands of people are cramped into the decrepit and unhygienic buildings described as “appalling” by a development organisation helping to upgrade them.
In the apartheid era the government actively encouraged companies to build single-sex hostels for male migrant workers on the premise that they were “temporarily” in the cities to work and would have to go “home” to their families when they had stopped working.
In the Western Cape that policy was refined even further because the region was a “coloured labour preference area”. Blacks were all meant to return to their homelands, mostly the Ciskei and Transkei.
In Cape Town a large number of companies actively collaborated with the government to build single-sex hostels on land leased from the government, which has since been transferred to the local city council, and 117 of these grim buildings still remain.
The hostels are theoretically still owned by companies including Baldwins Steel, Bokomo, Consol Glass, Cape Sun, Coca-Cola through Peninsula Beverages, Eskom, Gordon, Verhoef and Krause, Group 5, Imperial Cold Storage, Metropole Hotel, Murray and Roberts, Parmalat, Resnekov and Nielsen, Spekenham, Stocks and Stocks and the Vineyard/Township hotel group.
Some companies are still paying R6,90 a month for each of their employees living in the hostels and some are paying for electricity and water.
There is a lot of confusion about ownership and responsibility for the buildings a near-perfect situation for bureaucratic inaction.
A survey conducted by the Development Action Group (DAG) for the housing committee of the Cape Town city council found that 11?000 people are now living in the 117 company-owned hostels, about half of them families, including children.
“While the physical conditions in the hostels vary to some degree, they can be described as appalling in most, likewise for social conditions relating to severe overcrowding, an average of three people a bed, and the number of people obliged to share the over-used services and facilities, which are in poor condition,” the DAG report reads.
“To illustrate, there is an average of 14 people sharing one toilet, 23 people sharing one kitchen facility and only 12 hostels of the 96 surveyed have access to hot water.”
Last year the city council formally accepted that it was ultimately responsible for the transformation of the hostels as the “inherited owner” of the land on which they are situated.
The council is renovating its hostels and has already made nearly 600 family units available. Residents in one block of the upgraded hostels in Langa say they are satisfied with the upgrading where three rooms share adequate kitchen and ablution facilities at rents ranging from R98 to R112 a month for a room.
There is a seven-year programme to upgrade all council-owned hostels, provided the province continues to make subsidies available for this purpose.
But renovating the 117 company-owned hostels is a more complex problem.
The council’s housing committee resolved last year that the city should not accept automatic responsibility from companies that wished to terminate their lease or hand over their hostels to the council. It decided it should encourage and facilitate the upgrading of the hostels by entering partnerships with companies and residents and by exploring all potential financial sources for upgrading.
“Where possible, the city should encourage and facilitate the transfer of tenure to resident-managed housing organisations,” the DAG recommended.
The committee also decided that the city had to accept responsibility for the hostels where the owner company no longer existed and it should upgrade its capacity to administer and make the hostels habitable.
The DAG survey reported that “a number of companies contacted indicated their willingness to reach an agreement regarding the sale and upgrading of the hostels for which they are responsible”.
So, with company and council contributions, as well as the provision of the national R18?400 subsidy, a broad programme to renovate the company-owned hostels and transfer them into resident-owned housing corporations exists.
But the political will to implement this broad programme will be crucial.
Theodore Maboee, chair of the Maplangeni Crescent street committee in Zwelinzima Hlazo Village, Nyanga, said: “We don’t see the MPs here although I did see [African National Congress Chief Whip] Tony Yengeni on December 5 last year [local government elections]. They must come to the people.”
Hostel resident Gladys Ncalulu said she had been trying to get out of the hostel where she has lived with her family for five years, but nothing was happening under the new government: “We don’t know where to go.”