RIGHTS: South Africa Urged to Stop Abusing Eviction Policy to Clean Up Cities

By Kristin Palitza Reprint | | Print |

Kristin Palitza

JOHANNESBURG, Aug 7 2005 (IPS) - The South African government faces a dilemma. It has to evict people living in unacceptable housing conditions because of health and security risks, yet it is unable to provide enough adequate alternative accommodation – due to the backlog in low cost housing projects.

While municipalities rightfully try to eradicate health hazards, low cost housing activists claim that city officials use health and safety reasons as excuse to clean up cities to be able to redevelop them in time for the 2010 soccer world cup.

Past incidents prove that the eviction strategy has little effect. Evicted residents who do not have access to low cost housing will almost inevitably end up living on the street or in squatter camps where health and safety are equally compromised.

To date, South Africa still has more than 1,000 informal settlements.

South African housing minister Lindiwe Sisulu admitted the country was ”still faced with the serious challenge of informal settlements” and promised to ”eradicate slums (by) 2014”, in line with United Nations Millennium Development Goals. She made the remark when addressing the National Council of Provinces, the upper house of the legislature of South Africa, in mid-May.

It was the government’s goal to speed up the building of low cost housing and upgrade informal settlements with essential facilities like roads, streetlights and community centres, she said.

To a certain degree, the South African post-Apartheid housing policy, which provides people living in informal settlements with a one-size-fits-all housing subsidy scheme, has been successful.

In the first ten years following the demise of apartheid, the government built 1.6 million houses and approved 2.4 million housing subsidies, which Sisulu claimed amounts to more than ten percent of formal housing countrywide.

In South Africa, citizens have to apply for a housing subsidy to receive a low cost home. The government subsidises citizens who are over 21 years old, married or living with a long-term partner and have dependants who have not owned property before, and whose combined household income is below 550 dollars per month.

Persons with a household income of below 235 dollars per month get the maximum subsidy of 4,375 dollars, which equals the cost of a low cost home and the land it stands on. Those earning up to 550 dollars per month receive a lower subsidy of a minimum of 2,500 dollars and have to bring up the rest of the money themselves.

In the last financial year alone, the government built almost 180,000 low cost housing units countrywide. For 2005/2006 it has budgeted 745 million dollars for low cost housing and promised to increase the budget by another 308 million dollars over the next two years.

In the meantime, South Africa’s poor are suffering from the backlog in low cost housing. In Gauteng, the richest province in which Johannesburg and Pretoria are situated, almost half a million people have put their name on the housing waiting list. And in Cape Town, South Africa’s second city, 120,000 people are waiting for housing.

Comprehensive data indicating how many more low cost homes are needed nationwide are not available. And the country’s housing backlog numbers are held at municipal level and seldom publicly released.

In townships around Cape Town, Johannesburg, Durban, Port Elizabeth, and in the Free State province, masses of poor informal settlers have protested in the past years against slow implementation of low cost housing schemes.

While the government is trying to catch up with its low cost housing plans, new squatter settlements mushroom close to the country’s urban centres every month due to rapid urbanisation and rising unemployment.

South Africa’s unemployment rate has risen 0.3 percent from September 2004 to 26.5 percent in March of this year, according to Stats SA, a company that supplies the South African government with data. Unemployment dropped, however, from 45.3 percent in 1994.

Low cost housing activists, such as members of the Centre for Applied Legal Studies (CALS), a non-governmental organisation (NGO) in Johannesburg, say the government’s housing policy does not work because it tries to drive the poor out of urban areas to renovate inner cities and free them from crime.

Low cost housing projects were generally located outside of the city from which it was difficult to access jobs or social services. As a result, the poor built new squatter camps closer to urban areas ”where they can earn their livelihoods”, explained CALS research officer Stuart Wilson.

In her speech to the National Council of Provinces in May, Sisulu promised to reverse the trend to develop low cost housing on the periphery of cities and towns where there is limited access to services and social facilities and where transport costs to employment and retail opportunities are highest.

Government has been hesitant to develop low cost housing projects in the city, as land in central urban areas is far more expensive than land outside of the city.

Municipalities prefer to attract high-value businesses that are, next to industry, the highest ratepayers in the country rather than given prime locations to low cost housing projects.

The few times government did attempt to develop low cost homes in the city centre, it had to face numerous objections from lobby groups from neighbouring middle-class or high-value residential areas.

Such objections delayed, for example, the development of Cosmo City, a low cost housing area north of Johannesburg, for five years. A costly and frustrating process for all parties involved.

Sisulu announced in mid-July that 20 percent of private land development will be allocated to low cost housing, which means that government will make use of its right to expropriate land in the public interest. This measure may affect private developers who own still undeveloped land in central urban areas.

Not every centrally located, unused piece of land is feasible to be transformed into low cost housing, though, said Aly Karam, senior lecturer at the University of Witwatersrand’s School of Architecture and Planning in Johannesburg.

”Municipalities need to incorporate low cost housing in the cities while generally improving the standard of living for everyone,” he added.

Other housing experts remain sceptical, however, if Sisulu’s pledge to locate low cost housing projects more centrally will see implementation or remain lip service.

Johannesburg has become one of the cities where the lack of low cost housing has become most obvious.

Earlier this month, 600 residents were evicted from Bree Chambers in Johannesburg’s central business district from buildings that do not meet municipal health and safety regulations.

Representatives of the City of Johannesburg said it evicted residents because buildings were overcrowded, infected with rodents, had overloaded sewerage systems, no fire regulations and illegal electrical conditions.

Although the municipality may be right in assessing these houses as health hazards, low cost housing activists say it is unconstitutional to evict the poor without proper notice and offering alternative accommodation.

The Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions (COHRE), an ngo based in Geneva, Switzerland, and CALS voiced their concern about the government’s ”systematic violations of the right of access to adequate housing and the right of protection from arbitrary eviction” in a joint statement to the City of Johannesburg on July 19.

”(The government) cannot alleviate the health and safety situation by kicking people out of their homes,” CALS researcher, Wilson, said. Such evictions were ”arbitrary, inhumane and in violation of South African constitutional law and international human rights law.”

The municipality has been evicting people in Johannesburg’s inner city from about 70 privately owned buildings since 2001, the two ngos said.

COHRE and CALS claim the Johannesburg City Council used laws that were passed during Apartheid to legalise evictions, such as the National Building Regulations and Building Standards Act. The act had remained part of South Africa’s legislation although it disregarded international law and avoided appropriate legislation to be passed in accordance with the new Constitution.

The ngos argue the city should instead use the Prevention of Illegal Eviction and Unlawful Occupation of Land Act, which was passed in 1998 to ensure that mediation takes place before desperately poor people without security of tenure are evicted from their homes. The act also demands provision of alternatives where possible.

The redevelopment process of the Johannesburg inner city ”has been the direct cause of a disturbing number of human rights violations”, claimed COHRE in a statement last week.

In addition, evictions are increasingly being used as a method to recover unpaid rents, rates and utility bills, said COHRE deputy director Jean du Plessis.

The ngos say landlords let buildings purposefully decline to be able to clear them of poor residents, renovate them and then attract new investors.

Municipalities and investors wanted to ”upgrade the inner city by pushing people out rather than cooperating with them”, Wilson said.

COHRE estimates that about 25,000 people in Johannesburg’s inner city are at risk of losing their homes as the municipality pursues its urban renewal scheme.

To improve the living situation of the poor, the South African government should look at policies other developing countries with similar issues have successfully implemented, activists demand. Brazil, Kenya and Thailand, for example, had implemented urban development laws and initiated community-upgrading programmes.

These countries had realised ”that it is not useful to simply resist land invasions but to work with informal settlers to find a solution to the housing problem,” said du Plessis. Although such examples were encouraging, they ”are still too few”, he added.

In Brazil’s capital Sao Paulo, the municipality cooperates with banks, funding organisations and informal settlers to jointly find solutions to housing problems. It recently transformed, for example, an informal settlement located in a well-positioned area within the city centre into a high-density residential area with 300 four-storey walk-ups into which the same informal settlers were moved.

Such a programme kept community structures intact and did not force people to leave the city, Karam said.

”This is a non-intrusive programme, which upgrades urban areas while ensuring people’s access to services and livelihoods,” he added, noting that both informal settlers and residents of high-value areas benefited from the project.