The CBD of Athlone, Cape Town, has become the first previously disadvantaged area in South Africa to be declared a City Improvement District (CID), a concept that has worked wonders in turning around parts of the CBDs of Cape Town and Johannesburg.
But can it work in smaller areas, driven by local owner-managers, as opposed to large corporations?
A trio of veteran Athlone business owners, Somaya Taliep, Allie Dhansay and David Huth, see a CID as their business centre’s last chance. In a CID scheme, property owners pay an obligatory top-up levy, above their normal municipal rates, which is used to improve services, such as security, cleaning, beautification and marketing.
“If your own family doesn’t come and shop here, how do you expect outsiders to come? And what is the reason why I wouldn’t allow my wife and kids to come here? It’s safety,” says Dhansay, owner of the once-famous Busy Corner Butchery in the Athlone CBD, which has suffered a “mass exodus” of shops and shoppers in the past 10 years.
It was once a thriving business centre in spite of apartheid neglect and, partly, because of it. Coloured wealth and business activity, as repressed as they were, concentrated in the small, bustling area. First came the freedom of 1994, which led to a mild outflow of wealthier residents. Then, devastatingly, came the massive shopping centres — Kenilworth, Century City and, most recently, Vangate.
Taliep, an Athlone property broker and former city councillor in the area, says: “I don’t think the CBD kept abreast of the changes to offer consumers a better shopping destination to compete with surrounding shopping centres.”
Later, more frankly, she says: “It was a dump. I mean, we had a dump site out here, we had a squatter camp here, there were housing issues, social issues, there were drug dens.”
A huge police station squats at the entrance of the CBD, but the police are so ineffective that schoolchildren are regularly robbed of their cellphones and watches at the station or on their way to the library, says Huth, the owner of Liberty Liquor Store, “the last surviving liquor store of about seven liquor licences in the greater Athlone”.
Meetings between the business community and the police have shown dismal shortcomings. In 2005 the station had two vehicles to service the greater Athlone area. In 2006 it had 30 vehicles, but no one to drive them, says Dhansay.
Various efforts to stop the rot were hampered by the lack of security. The city council built a modern transport interchange, but the promised CCTV cameras never materialised.
Last year, a desperate voluntary security project, supported at first by 50 Athlone businesses, flared up but died down after six months. Although there was a significant reduction in crime, most business owners stopped paying, thinking that the others would keep it going. “That’s the usual attitude,” says Huth.
It became clear a successful intervention would require the kind of teeth that a CID could provide.
The Cape Town by-law governing CIDs states that if 51% of the property owners in an area — their votes weighted according to the value of their property — agree to a CID, all the property owners must pay the levy.
A voluntary neighbourhood watch requires the collaboration of a host of individuals and strong-headed business-owner tenants — at least 150 in Athlone’s case — but a CID needs the buy-in only of property owners, 69 in the Athlone CBD.
With funds advanced by the Cape Regional Chamber, the trio set about canvassing property owners. “We surveyed the area, got a list of all the property owners, got the information from the council, did a spreadsheet, did a geographical map. From there we took the map. Each got x amount of property owners to contact and that’s what we did.”
A public meeting and “work sessions” were held “and after that, it was one-on-one meetings and tele-phone calls”.
They stopped as soon as they got more than the required amount of support.
Is there something to be said for canvassing everyone, instead of stopping at 51%? “Well, you know, some of it is demoralising when you come across some people who shoot you down in flames. It was stressful sometimes. There were one or two people who originally were very negative. I don’t want you to think that it was a piece of cake,” says Huth.
Interestingly, the three managed to gather enough support without being able to tell property owners exactly how much each was going to pay in CID levies. They had a fully worked-out budget and implementation plan, totalling about R750 000 a year over three years, but how much of that each property owner would pay depends on the value of the property — calculations that will have to be made by city finance officials.
With the CID approved by council, the next step is to appoint a CID manager who will oversee a private security contract, coordinated with the South African Police Services and metro police, cleaning services, social development projects and marketing. CCTV cameras will again be sought, outside the CID budget, from the council, failing which they will try private sponsorship.
The CID levies will be collected by the municipality with the normal rates, but they will be paid to the Athlone CID.
“If you asked me 10 years back, I would have said ‘why must I pay extra? It’s the responsibility of the government, I’m a ratepayer, I’m a taxpayer, all these things must be done [by government].’ As time has changed, you realise those days are over. It’s a new era that we’re going into and we have to change,” says Dhansay.
Athlone CBD
- Businesses: more than 150
- Property owners: 69
- Total value of property: R115-million (2006 municipal valuations)
- CID budget: R750 000 in 2007; R825 000 in 2008; R907 000 in 2009.
Athlone CID budget allocation
- Security: 49%
- Cleansing: 16%
- Social development and marketing: 12%
- Management and admin: 18%