Gauteng govt to restore abandoned buildings

The Gauteng department of human settlements is looking into rehabilitating old, abandoned, invaded, and dilapidated buildings in the province's inner cities.

MEC Tasneem Motara revealed this during her budget speech vote delivered at the Gauteng legislature on Wednesday.

Motara said the buildings would be used for rental or subsidised housing. Occupiers of hijacked buildings in the Joburg CBD who qualify for subsidised or nonsubsidised housing will be catered for, Motara said.

“We have to enter into a legal agreement with the City of Joburg or the property company, depending on who owns the property. We have very few properties that we own as provincial government in the precinct. But those that we do [own] will be fully rehabilitated for either rental stock or fully subsidised housing,” she said. 

Motara also said housing allocation would be prioritised and would be the 1996-1999 applicants, people with disabilities, child-headed households, and military veterans.

“The elimination of the title deeds backlog will continue to receive priority as evidenced by the robust actions we are taking to register outstanding title deeds. We will be focusing on fast-tracking the registration and transfer of subsidy homes and issuance of title deeds to households. Land and housing ownership are critical elements in winning the battle against the asset poverty of poor households.”

The revitalisation of the CBD is also one of the priorities of the seventh administration in the province according to Motara.

Her department will drive this effort through the resuscitation of dilapidated buildings and infrastructure within our inner cities, she said.

That would be done in partnership with the department of cooperative governance and traditional affairs in the province, she said.

In January, the office of City of Joburg mayor Kabelo Gwamanda said it had obtained several court orders to evacuate occupants of unsafe buildings since the deadly fire at Usindiso Building in August 2023, where 77 people lost their lives.

The orders allowed the city to start a process of evacuating some of these buildings in the interest of the safety of the inhabitants. 

However, Motara said the reason the municipality has not carried out the eviction order is “perhaps the fact that there is no stock on hand to relocate them”.

Earlier this month, residents living in hijacked buildings in the Joburg CBD told Sowetan that they were grateful that they live there as they don’t pay rent, because they have little money to even think about rent and services that many other people have to pay for.