“With a little bit of vision, a little bit of money, something new is beginning to emerge [in the inner city],” Lael Bethlehem, CEO of the Johannesburg Development Agency (JDA), said at Constitution Hill on Monday.
Speaking at the launch of the JDA’s 2006 Indicators of Progress in the Inner City annual report, held at the Women’s Jail, Bethlehem said: “The inner city has experienced tremendous improvement over the last five years … [but it] still requires a lot more work.”
Constitution Hill is located at the edge of Hillbrow, one of the most derelict areas in central Johannesburg. Bethlehem said the idea of Constitution Hill was to help with the further development of Hillbrow, and more improvements still had to be made.
“Carlton Centre is the dividing line in performance of the inner city,” Bethlehem said. She explained that the inner city was a very large and diverse place, but there was a general east/west split between the developments taking place.
While the area west of Carlton Centre, the financial sector, Braamfontein and Newtown were performing well, the fashion and jewellery district from End Street in the east, towards the Ellis Park area, were characterised by a greater “sense of decline,” Bethlehem said.
Gauteng mayor Amos Masondo said the JDA report was an objective assessment of work in the inner city.
“We need to acknowledge that a lot of work has been done and also that a lot of work needs to be done,” Masondo said.
The 2006 performance indicators report measured inner-city progress against four major indicators: the property market, including vacancy rates; rentals; confidence levels in the area; and Johannesburg as a 24-hour city.
Bethlehem emphasised that entertainment was key to achieving the identity of a 24-hour city, saying the success could be gauged by the number of people attending entertainment events and venues in the city.
But “transport plays a very big role as well”, she told the Mail & Guardian Online.
Bethlehem said part of the intention was to work in conjunction with the Department of Transport to improve public facilities in the inner city, especially at night.
Plans under way are set to include rapid-bus transits and an inner-city distribution service that would consist of colour-coded midi-buses following four set routes, and running only through the inner city, “sort of like a tube [subway] system, but with buses”, said Bethlehem.
In a statement, Masondo said there needed to be a focus on taking inner-city regeneration forward in the years leading up to the 2010 Soccer World Cup and beyond.
Announcing an Inner-City Summit to take place in April 2007, Masondo said it will see the release of the Inner-City Charter to record Johannesburg’s commitment to this regeneration.
The Summit and Charter process will involve stakeholders’ participation in different working groups, including economic infrastructure, residential development, transportation and safety and security.
The 2006 report measured confidence levels in the inner city, as well as confidence levels towards the fight against crime, both of which increased slightly over the past year.
Although 48,6% of inner-city residents said they did not feel safe outdoors, this figure was an improvement from the 2005 amount of 54,4%. Similarly this year, 30% of residents felt crime had increased, while last year the number stood at 34%.
More positively, in 2006, just 26% of respondents felt the inner city was “dirty and unsafe”, an improvement from the 2002 report, where the number stood at 80% of people polled. Forty percent of this year’s respondents also felt that security in the inner city was better than in the rest of Johannesburg.
“There is an improvement in people’s optimism of the inner city,” Bethlehem said.
“Confidence is something that we feel … confidence is an important feeling, it leads people to take money out of their pockets and put it into the inner city.”
The report also found a decline in vacancies in the inner city, particularly with regards to A-grade property space, which means the property should not be older than 15 years, or alternatively, has been renovated.
A-grade vacancies in the CBD, which peaked at 25,8% in 1999, now stand at about 5% in areas like Braamfontein. “There is a tremendous demand for A-grade office space” Bethlehem said.
Average rentals for A-grade property have increased to R34 a square metre in the CBD, and R57,50 in Braamfontein. This is significantly lower than the cost of office space in the north and Bethlehem said CBD prices would be helpful to smaller businesses looking to start up in the city.
She also said that prices should increase steadily over the years, and that the upward trend in the rental of office space showed that “in a sense, the city has done its work”.
Regarding B-grade office space, which included older buildings, vacancies have also stabilised, but at quite a high rate. Bethlehem said work needed to be done to make B-grade space more attractive.
Calling Braamfontein a “tremendous success story”, Bethlehem said she was surprised at how quickly the residential market in the area had taken off.
“There is a tremendous demand to be in the inner city”.
While Braamfontein and Newtown performed well, there was “much less good news” in areas like Hillbrow.
“There is good news, but it [the situation] is much more challenging … [and] much more needs to be done”.
Similarly, the Ellis Park area displayed the lowest score with regards to confidence levels, with residents’s responses indicating that there have been no improvements in cleanliness, orderliness, management or crime prevention in the area, despite official figures to the contrary.
Ellis Park is part of the 2010 precinct, and a key priority area. Bethlehem told the M&G Online that the JDA intended to “work extremely hard” to improve the area in time, but added that in order for their plans to be successful “a lot depends on the funding”.
Other priority areas over the next few years include Soweto, particularly the Baragwanath and Nasrec areas, and the inner city itself, which is still the core mandate, Bethlehem said.