MALAIKA MAHLATSI | New thinking needed for housing crisis

Last Thursday, a fire destroyed the five-storey Usindiso building in Marshalltown in the central business district of Johannesburg, killing 77 people, including 12 children. More than 50 other people were injured. The building, which housed more than 200 people, was one of many in the inner city that are unfit for human habitation.

It is reported that its occupants were living in squalid conditions, with curtains and cardboard used to partition the space. Makeshift shacks were erected within the building. Beyond this haphazard partitioning, the building had broken windows, unlit corridors, piles of garbage and some sewage.

Under normal circumstances, such buildings would be condemned by the government. However, in the City of Johannesburg and other cities across SA, they are overtaken by syndicates who collect rent from occupants but do not pay rates and taxes to municipalities. The result is that these buildings depend on illegal electricity and water connections or do not provide these at all.

Following the deadly fire, there have been many discussions about “hijacked” buildings. Many of these are laced with xenophobic sentiments, with the dominant argument being that undocumented immigrants are responsible for the phenomenon of hijacked buildings – that the syndicates that hijack the buildings are occupants of these buildings.

This narrative is not completely true as there are many South African nationals living in such buildings, many of them working-class men and women from rural areas and townships, who move to city centres in search for better employment. But more importantly, government officials play an instrumental role in the hijacking of buildings.

There is irrefutable evidence that many state-owned properties and tracts of land have been hijacked by a syndicate working with government officials. This was confirmed in 2019 by the then minister of public works, Patricia de Lille, who stated that many of the hijacked buildings belonged to the government.

Senior officials in her department confirmed that the illegal leasing and sale of state property was being facilitated by employees of the state, with one quoted in a 2019 investigative report by Graeme Hosken and Mpumzi Zuzile as saying: “Corrupt officials, who access the unsecured register, work with criminals to identify neglected, forgotten or vacant properties.

“They transfer these to third parties and then sell or lease them, earning themselves millions of rands. We are not just talking about one property, but hundreds. Houses, flats, office blocks and land are being hijacked and stolen without the government’s knowledge.”

At the centre of the problem is that, by its own admission, the government, despite being the custodian of more than 30,000 pieces of land and more than 80,000 buildings, does not know the status and value of this property (though it is estimated at just over R128bn).

At the time of doing data collection for my masters in urban and regional planning in 2021/2022, there was no updated registry of state-owned property stock in the entire Gauteng province. Additionally, there’s inadequate monitoring and evaluation of state properties across the country. It is a crisis that makes the hijacking of buildings not only possible but also inevitable.

There are other structural and socio-economic issues around the issue of hijacked buildings, one of which is the housing backlog, that SA has been faced with since we ushered in a new dispensation. The urban landlessness crisis doesn’t receive the attention that it should because the land question in our country is largely about agricultural land.

But the housing crisis across all metros is indicative of the necessity for new thinking on the urban land question – a question that intersects with poverty and structural inequalities. Without the political will necessary to resolve the housing crisis in cities, which could be done through interventions such as the state converting the property stock it owns into low-cost social housing, the horrific disaster that occurred in Marshalltown will continue to happen. It’s inevitable.