The Supreme Court of Appeal (SCA) has upheld an appeal by the City of Johannesburg, which wants to remove about 300 people from buildings in its inner city due to health reasons and other dangers.
The SCA held that the residents of two of the buildings had one month to vacate the buildings, otherwise the sheriff would be permitted to remove all persons from the properties and perform ”such steps as may be necessary” to prevent the reoccupation of the buildings.
The court also ordered that the police should assist the sheriff if necessary.
The court ruling came after the city earlier wanted to evict the people from the inner-city properties under the National Building Regulations and Building Standards Act, which enables the city to prevent people under its jurisdiction from living in dangerous conditions.
A high court decision in March last year, in favour of the residents of the buildings, stopped the evictions.
The matter concerns a multistorey building, known as San Jose, in Berea, and a disused two-storey panel-beating workshop on Main Street, in the city centre.
Appeals Judge Louis Harms said in the judgement that he found the city’s notice to vacate due to fire and health hazards to be neither unconstitutional nor otherwise unlawful.
Accommodation
”Moreover, the obligation of the occupiers to comply with that order is not dependent upon their being provided with alternative accommodation, even if the effect of complying with the order will be that they are left without access to adequate housing,” the judgement read.
Earlier, the residents argued in court that the eviction orders the municipality seeks would effectively render them homeless, which was in violation of their constitutionally guaranteed rights to housing and protection from arbitrary evictions.
The SCA also ordered the city to offer those evicted relocation to a temporary settlement area, which would provide basic sanitation, water and refuse services.
Harms said the evictions in the matter did not absolve the city from any constitutional obligations.
”It is apparent that immediately upon eviction at least some of the occupiers will not have access to any housing as a consequence of their eviction. To some degree, at least, that will place obligations upon the city to provide a measure of relief.”
The unanimous judgement by five appeals judges also found that this relocation did not have to be within the inner city area as demanded by the residents in court papers.
Reaction
The City of Johannesburg welcomed the judgement. ”We are humbled by the SCA judgement. We undertake to do whatever the court has ordered,” said councillor Ruby Mathang, member of a mayoral committee on development planning and urban management.
”The SCA judgement augurs well for the city’s programmes of urban regeneration … the city is conscious of the housing needs of the people of Johannesburg and will, through its housing policies, remain committed to catering for the housing needs of its residents, especially the poor,” city spokesperson Nthathise Modingoane said in a statement.
However, the Centre for Applied Legal Studies (Cals), which represents the interests of a few hundred inner-city residents threatened with eviction, said it is considering appealing the court judgement.
”We are concerned that the judgment appears to condone the City of Johannesburg’s decision to exclude the poor from its inner-city regeneration strategy. We are studying the judgement carefully and considering an appeal to the Constitutional Court on these points,” Cals researcher Stuart Wilson said in a statement.
The buildings involved in the court case are dilapidated and often without access to basic necessities such as water and electricity. Its residents are the city’s ultra-poor, who work as informal traders in the city centre and do not earn enough to afford adequate accommodation in the surrounds.
”We are deeply worried that this judgement has effectively denied the right of inner-city residents to live near their place of work,” Jean du Plessis, acting executive director of the Geneva-based Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions, said in a statement.
”Our research in Johannesburg has clearly shown that the affected residents are too poor to travel to and from far-flung settlements to their work places in the inner city. To relocate them to places far away from the city centre will have disastrous implications for the survival strategies of many families,” he said.
”The judgement constitutes a partial victory for the inner-city poor,” Wilson said. ”[But] we are concerned that the judgement does not go far enough in protecting the occupiers of so-called ‘bad’ buildings in the Johannesburg inner city from arbitrary exercises of state power.”