CITICHAT 16/2007 - 27 April 2007
The Changing City (1)
Haven’t wanted to pre-empt anything that might be part of the Mayoral Inner City Summit & Charter, now just a week-and-a-day away. That’s quite difficult as my whole life over the past few months, and this last month in particular, seems to have been revolving around various aspects related to the Summit with little to no time to concentrate on any other issues. However, one issue that I thought I might share with you is that of the changes that the inner city is undergoing. This week I want to look at some of the basic reasons for the decline of the inner city. Then, next week I’ll look at the responses to the changes brought about by the decline - almost as an introduction to the Summit which will commit to appropriate action over the next five to ten years. Let’s start with the reasons for decline (many of which are dealt with in detail in Keith Beavon’s excellent book ‘Johannesburg, the Making and Shaping of a City’).
As I have often said, a number of people like to blame the decline of the city on the 1994 change of Government in the country. Nothing could be further from the truth. After decades of explosive growth, the ‘seeds of decline’ actually started in the ‘50s and were compounded each decade until the actual decline ‘took root’ in the ‘80s. By the ‘90s urban decay ‘blossomed’ and it wasn’t until 2000 that an axe was firmly taken to start cutting away the rot and new growth started to appear. So back to the ‘50s.
The 1950s: the decision to relocate the City Council offices from the CBD to Braamfontein was seen at the time by many in the private sector as a vote of no-confidence by the authorities in the CBD. Although the actual move only took place in 1972 (22 years being a good period for the public sector of the time to translate decisions into action!) a number of CBD based corporations followed the Council’s lead and relocated to Braamfontein prior to the Council’s move. These included Escom, South African Breweries (SAB), Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) and Shell. I have made the comment previously that often major decisions appear to be made without fully taking into account the long term consequences thereof. A decision to, instead, consolidate the city’s presence in the CBD could have had far more positive long term consequences. But monuments to regimes are far more appealing!
At the time of the Council’s 1950 decision there were only 4 923 square metres of office space in Braamfontein. By 1965 this figure had mushroomed to 163 113 most of it at the CBD’s expense.
The 1960s: The philosophy that predicated the layout of Johannesburg as a mining town - narrow streets, small erven and small city blocks - together with subsequent town planning regulations to curb the height of buildings, had acted as a brake on development. In the ‘60s the town planning regulations were finally changed to allow for taller buildings that could accommodate allowable bulk. This started a new building boom which included the construction of some 60 tower blocks. By the mid’60s the ‘boom’ had increased the 1950s available office space by a third.
The late ‘60s, however, also saw the introduction of an ill-conceived and poorly managed parking policy which permitted a low maximum number of basement parking bays in any new development. An extremely poor public transportation system together with a propensity for business to want to have their motor vehicles located in the same buildings in which they worked, resulted in developers looking further afield to where planning was more permissive. We still suffer the consequences of this policy with the city today being hopelessly inadequately provided with parking.
The 1970s: The traditional Central Business District or CBD was roughly the area of the two original mining camps laid out in the mid 1880s. In the ‘70s the SABC headquarters moved out of this CBD and the City Council finally moved to Braamfontein - together they contributed to a loss of some 5 000 persons from the CBD. The Carlton Centre, perceived by its developers as a large enough intervention to shift the centre of gravity of the CBD further east, was completed at a time when the city’s most prestigious department stores were already relocating to the suburbs. It thus not only did not have the desired influence on the city’s retail but also drove property prices extremely high in its vicinity. The Johannesburg Stock Exchange, widely expected to follow the move of the Carlton Centre eastwards, decided instead to move west just outside of the traditional CBD boundary where land was cheaper. The United Building Society however moved even further east of the Carlton where ABSA was eventually to consolidate their corporate head office campus. Sanlam moved their corporate offices from their core CBD location into a new building north of the Carlton whilst the Standard Bank bought ground to the south of the traditional CBD for their future superblock.
Thus, instead of a clustering of activities that one finds in most major cities, the dominant developments of the ‘70s were to spread and locate at the four corners of the traditional CBD. The result was a stretching or dispersal of the traditional CBD to a point that it could no longer act coherently and efficiently, particularly in view of the city’s lack of public transport. This dispersal was also to have a major impact on retail patterns.
The 1980s: The decade of the ‘80s saw the trickle of decentralisation started in the previous few decades, turn into a flood. Decentralised shopping malls near to places of residence were far more convenient for shopper/workers who had been spread to the four extremities of the CBD. In the early ‘80s, Greatermans, Stuttafords and John Orrs closed their CBD stores and the order of retailing in the city declined. Now office accommodation followed the retail. The result was that, between 1981 and 1984, there were 431 000 square metres of office space under construction in the suburbs compared to less than half that, 205 000, in the CBD and Braamfontein.
An important sector that was affected by the downscaling in retail during this period was the medical sector. Previously, patients had combined their medical visits to the CBD with shopping. With the decline of CBD retail they were not keen to visit the CBD at all and the medical profession basically moved north. This sector was not to recover until 2005/6.
The 1990s was a period during which the Inner City was in free fall.
From a political point of view, the last of the city’s non-representative councils appeared to be in paralysis - clearly they didn’t want to do anything that might affect the ‘new’ electorate (and their chances of re-election as remote as these were) so they preferred to do nothing. As a result there was absolutely no urban management in operation in the inner city; by-laws such as those related to informal trading were not repealed but were just not enforced resulting in a massive uncontrolled and unmanaged spiral of traders on the city’s pavements in turn resulting in an acceleration of retail exiting the inner city. Taxis commandeered roads and pavements as ranking areas and the inner city was dirty, neglected and unsafe.
The ‘political paralysis’ in so far as the inner city was concerned , continued into the second half of the decade when the first of the democratically elected councils focused their attention, understandably, in restructuring the apartheid structures they had inherited. Regrettably the structures that they initially introduced were to have a major negative impact on the inner city.
The unmanaged state of the inner city continued. Blocks of apartments were hi-jacked by militant tenants placing rentals in specially created accounts at best or refusing to pay rentals at all at worst. Landlord/tenant relationships plunged and many properties were left without services as property owners struggled to come to grips with the changing scenario. Financial institutions withdrew from the market and an extensive period of “red-lining” of most of the inner city was imposed, always denied by the institutions.
Prime office rentals slipped back to levels last experienced three to five years previously and vacancies increased dramatically as an increasing number of businesses moved elsewhere as soon as their leases permitted them to do so.
The Johannesburg Sun Hotel was downgraded from five to one star and the Carlton Hotel steadily lost its core clients – the airline crews - who relocated to hotels to the north, and eventually both hotels closed. Even the prostitutes started abandoning the inner city, moving north to areas in which new hotels were flourishing.
The legal sector followed the medical sector in relocating to the north.
Structurally, the traditional CBD imploded – major initiatives had been focused on its four corners with the result that the traditional core was dramatically weakened. Now many of the major institutions heavily invested in the traditional core, started to disinvest. In a 1999 Economic Review of the Inner City, Professor Richard Tomlinson made the following comment:-
“The Johannesburg CBD is essentially owned and controlled by 20 major landowners of which the most notable are Old Mutual, Anglo American, First National Bank, JCI, Sage, Sanlam and Standard Bank.”
Next week we’ll look at how this ‘owning and controlling’ by the 20 major landowners ended and at the structural changes to the inner city that the 2000s heralded.
Trust you have a wonderful and safe long weekend, cheers neil
Friday, April 27, 2007
Sunday, April 15, 2007
Residential evictions -Citichat 20 April 2007
CITICHAT 15/2007 - 20 April 2007
The Law is an Ass and the President has spoken.
In Charles Dickens’ "Oliver Twist" Mr. Bumble says "If the law supposes that” squeezing his hat emphatically in both hands, "the law is a ass - a idiot. If that's the eye of the law, the law is a bachelor; and the worst I wish the law is, that his eye may be opened by experience--by experience."
One of the most difficult concepts for one to get one’s mind around in the urban regeneration process is that of evictions. The dictionary defines evict as to “expel from a property by a legal process”. The very word conjures up emotive images that the media love to confront us with – poor people sitting dejectedly on meager possessions strewn on pavements by brutal security guards employed by the sheriff. The reports that accompany the pictures inevitably depict the situation as one fraught with injustice, poverty and abuse of the poor. Certainly the very act of eviction is one that is supremely negative – it tells those involved that they are not part of the community of the city, that they are not wanted.
But of course it is not always that simple. Dig a bit more deeply and often the underlying facts change the way that one views the situation. One starts to find that there is often huge exploitation of the affected people; by gangsters who extort ‘rental’ from the residents; by persons who spread blatant untruths to gullible people; by lawyers who deliberately run up the costs by filing papers late thus prolonging the process; by the very conditions that people are living in. Listen to this description of a building from which the council requested an eviction order – “the floors were flooded with sewer water and that water ran through the building and spilled out of the parking level onto the pavement……… there were no fire extinguishers, the fire hydrants were unusable, there was no water supply, smoke and draught doors had been broken and unsafe electrical wiring abounded. In the event of a fire, the occupants would not be able to escape or be rescued…….the parking garage was filled with waste and sewer water as well as refuse and faeces; the fire escapes were totally filled with refuse and were unusable…..all the courtyards and other open spaces were filled with faeces and refuse….” etc etc.
A previously fine building, the Avril Malan Building on the corner of Sauer and Commissioner Streets, was recently highlighted in the media as ‘the worst building in the city’ - the above description comes nowhere close to the conditions in which some 600 people were illegally living – a council official who visited the building says that the entire building has been systematically trashed, even the massive bronze entrance doors have been torn out and sold for scrap. The building is evidently controlled by the very worse kind of gangsters.
Can the City allow this situation to exist?
Just over a year ago now, a ruling on evictions by the city council and related issues was handed down. I quoted liberally from the judgment in Citichat 7.2006
The High Court judgment centred around an application brought by the Council to evict over 300 people from 6 properties in the inner city based on the National Building Regulations and Building Standards Act 103 0f 1977 “which concerns the City’s ability to exercise its statutory powers and duties to prevent dangerous living conditions in its area of jurisdiction.”
The judgment stated that the Council had failed to comply with the constitutional and statutory obligations of a local authority and failed to give adequate priority and resources to people in the inner city who are in a crisis situation or in desperate need of accommodation. In addition the judgment made it clear that the poor people resident in so-called “bad buildings” of the inner city of Johannesburg must be given access to a home in the inner city area if the city wants to evict them from accommodation it considers unsafe. The rationale was that it is of no value to push poor people from the inner city to areas where they have no hope of finding opportunities to improve their economic situations. The judgment effectively stopped any further evictions until such time as the Council came up with a plan as to how they were going to deal with the problem created by evictions.
I pointed out that as a result of the ruling the Council found themselves between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, it desperately needed to address the dozens of ‘sinkholes’ that have been allowed to fester in the inner city if the inner city is to be truly revitalised, and, on the other, there was no practical solution to the accommodation needs of thousands of poor people when the sinkholes are addressed!
The second act in the saga occurred earlier this year when the Council appealed to the Supreme Court of Appeal against the judgment. The appeal concerned “in the main the right of a local authority to order occupiers by notice to vacate a building because it is necessary for their safety or the safety of others and its right, if they fail to comply, to apply for an order of court for their eviction.” The Appeal Court judge saw the case as only peripherally about the constitutional duty of organs of state towards those who are evicted from their homes and are in a desperate condition. “The central dispute” he said “is rather whether the city is precluded from exercising its powers to order persons to vacate unsafe buildings unless it first provides them (or at least provide them) with adequate alternative housing. A subsidiary question that arises if the earlier question is answered against the city is whether such alternative housing must be within the city itself.”
The Judge upheld the City’s right to evict people on the grounds that their safety was at risk and ruled that the City must offer and provide those people who are evicted and are desperately in need of housing assistance with relocation to a temporary settlement area within its municipal area – not necessarily within the inner city. He offered some practical procedures that had to be followed.
The judgment also contained two references to the inner city vision and current urban renewal strategy. The first states that “the vision and plan effectively deny the poor access to housing in the inner city” and the second “….while it is true that the City has developed, with broad strokes, visions and plans that it has for the city, and that those plans do not altogether leave out the poor, there is little evidence to demonstrate what the city has actually done.”
I have been saying much the same thing for a couple of years now. However, I think that the Appeal Court judgment reflected a far more balanced approach to the huge issue facing the City and provided a critical way forward.
But the saga is not over. The third act was announced yesterday when The Star reported that an application for leave to appeal against the Supreme Court of Appeal judgment was lodged – if approved this will transfer the matter to the Constitutional Court from where a final ruling will be made. In the meantime thousands of people will continue to live in inhumane and dangerous conditions and continue to be exploited by the system. On the other hand it does give the City the opportunity to put in place emergency and transitional shelter, something that is in fact proceeding with all haste.
But now another drama is playing itself out. This time it is a High Court ruling issued last week. The story appears to be that a group of investors bought a building in Soper Road, Berea, from a deceased estate. The new owners advised the residents that they were going to upgrade the building – the tenants replied that they would not pay rent because they had been told by ‘the person collecting the rent’ that they would be given their flats free of charge by the government because the owner was dead! The building is in an appalling condition, the alleyway behind the building is a rubbish dump because the tenants prefer to hurl their refuse out of the window rather than use bins. The new owners applied for an eviction order so as to be able to undertake the upgrade and as they were faced with tenants refusing to pay rent whilst they, the owners, had to pay Council rates and services costs. The judge introduced a totally new scenario when he ruled that property owners could not obtain a single eviction order for the 24 tenants who are refusing to pay rent (“each person has a different set of circumstances”) and that the owners may not cut off water and electricity services even though they are unable to recover these costs from the tenants. In other words the law actively protects law-breakers.
To seek individual eviction orders is going to cost the owners R120 000-00 over and above the R70 000-00 costs they have already run up and take about another 6 months whilst the tenants refuse to pay rent! The implications of individual eviction orders on the rest of the inner city are frightening.
The protection of people who are clearly illegally occupying buildings – illegally in that they refuse to pay rent or service charges – is made possible through the Prevention of Illegal Eviction from and Unlawful Occupation of Land Act – otherwise known as the PIE Act. This was merely a piece of squatter control legislation related to land but, through a controversial court decision in 2002, defaulting tenants and home loan non-payers have been able to hide behind it. An amendment to correct the legislation was promulgated in 2003 but was then withdrawn. So for the past four years we have defaulters protected legally whilst the city’s buildings become cesspits.
I can only conclude that Mr. Bumble was right!
The President has spoken!
The President evidently castigated business quite severely at his meeting with them last weekend but the Council was also not spared from some heavy criticism. The result has been quite interesting – at a number of meetings I attended this week, Council officials were saying that they were hurriedly reviewing their plans and programmes because “The President said…………” What the President said of course is nothing new, nothing that hasn’t been said previously and ignored – the fact that it came from the President makes everything different. Hope he comes more often!
Ciao, neil
The Law is an Ass and the President has spoken.
In Charles Dickens’ "Oliver Twist" Mr. Bumble says "If the law supposes that” squeezing his hat emphatically in both hands, "the law is a ass - a idiot. If that's the eye of the law, the law is a bachelor; and the worst I wish the law is, that his eye may be opened by experience--by experience."
One of the most difficult concepts for one to get one’s mind around in the urban regeneration process is that of evictions. The dictionary defines evict as to “expel from a property by a legal process”. The very word conjures up emotive images that the media love to confront us with – poor people sitting dejectedly on meager possessions strewn on pavements by brutal security guards employed by the sheriff. The reports that accompany the pictures inevitably depict the situation as one fraught with injustice, poverty and abuse of the poor. Certainly the very act of eviction is one that is supremely negative – it tells those involved that they are not part of the community of the city, that they are not wanted.
But of course it is not always that simple. Dig a bit more deeply and often the underlying facts change the way that one views the situation. One starts to find that there is often huge exploitation of the affected people; by gangsters who extort ‘rental’ from the residents; by persons who spread blatant untruths to gullible people; by lawyers who deliberately run up the costs by filing papers late thus prolonging the process; by the very conditions that people are living in. Listen to this description of a building from which the council requested an eviction order – “the floors were flooded with sewer water and that water ran through the building and spilled out of the parking level onto the pavement……… there were no fire extinguishers, the fire hydrants were unusable, there was no water supply, smoke and draught doors had been broken and unsafe electrical wiring abounded. In the event of a fire, the occupants would not be able to escape or be rescued…….the parking garage was filled with waste and sewer water as well as refuse and faeces; the fire escapes were totally filled with refuse and were unusable…..all the courtyards and other open spaces were filled with faeces and refuse….” etc etc.
A previously fine building, the Avril Malan Building on the corner of Sauer and Commissioner Streets, was recently highlighted in the media as ‘the worst building in the city’ - the above description comes nowhere close to the conditions in which some 600 people were illegally living – a council official who visited the building says that the entire building has been systematically trashed, even the massive bronze entrance doors have been torn out and sold for scrap. The building is evidently controlled by the very worse kind of gangsters.
Can the City allow this situation to exist?
Just over a year ago now, a ruling on evictions by the city council and related issues was handed down. I quoted liberally from the judgment in Citichat 7.2006
The High Court judgment centred around an application brought by the Council to evict over 300 people from 6 properties in the inner city based on the National Building Regulations and Building Standards Act 103 0f 1977 “which concerns the City’s ability to exercise its statutory powers and duties to prevent dangerous living conditions in its area of jurisdiction.”
The judgment stated that the Council had failed to comply with the constitutional and statutory obligations of a local authority and failed to give adequate priority and resources to people in the inner city who are in a crisis situation or in desperate need of accommodation. In addition the judgment made it clear that the poor people resident in so-called “bad buildings” of the inner city of Johannesburg must be given access to a home in the inner city area if the city wants to evict them from accommodation it considers unsafe. The rationale was that it is of no value to push poor people from the inner city to areas where they have no hope of finding opportunities to improve their economic situations. The judgment effectively stopped any further evictions until such time as the Council came up with a plan as to how they were going to deal with the problem created by evictions.
I pointed out that as a result of the ruling the Council found themselves between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, it desperately needed to address the dozens of ‘sinkholes’ that have been allowed to fester in the inner city if the inner city is to be truly revitalised, and, on the other, there was no practical solution to the accommodation needs of thousands of poor people when the sinkholes are addressed!
The second act in the saga occurred earlier this year when the Council appealed to the Supreme Court of Appeal against the judgment. The appeal concerned “in the main the right of a local authority to order occupiers by notice to vacate a building because it is necessary for their safety or the safety of others and its right, if they fail to comply, to apply for an order of court for their eviction.” The Appeal Court judge saw the case as only peripherally about the constitutional duty of organs of state towards those who are evicted from their homes and are in a desperate condition. “The central dispute” he said “is rather whether the city is precluded from exercising its powers to order persons to vacate unsafe buildings unless it first provides them (or at least provide them) with adequate alternative housing. A subsidiary question that arises if the earlier question is answered against the city is whether such alternative housing must be within the city itself.”
The Judge upheld the City’s right to evict people on the grounds that their safety was at risk and ruled that the City must offer and provide those people who are evicted and are desperately in need of housing assistance with relocation to a temporary settlement area within its municipal area – not necessarily within the inner city. He offered some practical procedures that had to be followed.
The judgment also contained two references to the inner city vision and current urban renewal strategy. The first states that “the vision and plan effectively deny the poor access to housing in the inner city” and the second “….while it is true that the City has developed, with broad strokes, visions and plans that it has for the city, and that those plans do not altogether leave out the poor, there is little evidence to demonstrate what the city has actually done.”
I have been saying much the same thing for a couple of years now. However, I think that the Appeal Court judgment reflected a far more balanced approach to the huge issue facing the City and provided a critical way forward.
But the saga is not over. The third act was announced yesterday when The Star reported that an application for leave to appeal against the Supreme Court of Appeal judgment was lodged – if approved this will transfer the matter to the Constitutional Court from where a final ruling will be made. In the meantime thousands of people will continue to live in inhumane and dangerous conditions and continue to be exploited by the system. On the other hand it does give the City the opportunity to put in place emergency and transitional shelter, something that is in fact proceeding with all haste.
But now another drama is playing itself out. This time it is a High Court ruling issued last week. The story appears to be that a group of investors bought a building in Soper Road, Berea, from a deceased estate. The new owners advised the residents that they were going to upgrade the building – the tenants replied that they would not pay rent because they had been told by ‘the person collecting the rent’ that they would be given their flats free of charge by the government because the owner was dead! The building is in an appalling condition, the alleyway behind the building is a rubbish dump because the tenants prefer to hurl their refuse out of the window rather than use bins. The new owners applied for an eviction order so as to be able to undertake the upgrade and as they were faced with tenants refusing to pay rent whilst they, the owners, had to pay Council rates and services costs. The judge introduced a totally new scenario when he ruled that property owners could not obtain a single eviction order for the 24 tenants who are refusing to pay rent (“each person has a different set of circumstances”) and that the owners may not cut off water and electricity services even though they are unable to recover these costs from the tenants. In other words the law actively protects law-breakers.
To seek individual eviction orders is going to cost the owners R120 000-00 over and above the R70 000-00 costs they have already run up and take about another 6 months whilst the tenants refuse to pay rent! The implications of individual eviction orders on the rest of the inner city are frightening.
The protection of people who are clearly illegally occupying buildings – illegally in that they refuse to pay rent or service charges – is made possible through the Prevention of Illegal Eviction from and Unlawful Occupation of Land Act – otherwise known as the PIE Act. This was merely a piece of squatter control legislation related to land but, through a controversial court decision in 2002, defaulting tenants and home loan non-payers have been able to hide behind it. An amendment to correct the legislation was promulgated in 2003 but was then withdrawn. So for the past four years we have defaulters protected legally whilst the city’s buildings become cesspits.
I can only conclude that Mr. Bumble was right!
The President has spoken!
The President evidently castigated business quite severely at his meeting with them last weekend but the Council was also not spared from some heavy criticism. The result has been quite interesting – at a number of meetings I attended this week, Council officials were saying that they were hurriedly reviewing their plans and programmes because “The President said…………” What the President said of course is nothing new, nothing that hasn’t been said previously and ignored – the fact that it came from the President makes everything different. Hope he comes more often!
Ciao, neil
Friday, April 13, 2007
Likker not Lekker Citichat 13 April 2007
CITICHAT 14/2007 - 13 April 2007
Likker is not always Lekker and the Pres comes to town
The three essential commodities that accompanied the early growth of Joeys were gold, liquor and sex. From a base of probably 200 people in the area at the time of the discovery of gold, the population skyrocketed to 26 000 within four years; 74 000 in ten and 620 000 in 40 years. At the end of four years there were 312 bars and many sex workers providing for the mainly male population. And as the gold was progressively reduced, the other two increased, exponentially! (I see that our National Commissioner of Police is now recommending that sex workers become legalized before 2010 and there is also a suggestion floating around that a red light district should be introduced in the Inner City.)
The bigger problem for the moment relates to the issuing of liquor licenses. I understand that there are more liquor licenses in Gauteng than the total of all the other provinces! Certainly the Inner City has seen a rash of indiscriminate liquor licenses being granted with absolutely no public consultation. International research has clearly demonstrated the linkages between the availability of liquor and levels of crime and violence. This past Easter weekend was accompanied by many ‘don’t drink and drive’ advertisements in acknowledgement of the fact that the majority of road accidents and fatalities can be linked to drivers under the influence of alcohol – recently these purportedly included a Chief of Police and a Judge!
Evidently the Provincial Government published a Draft Liquor Policy towards the end of last year – I say evidently because I certainly missed the notice and the process that was adopted, described by one inner-city colleague as opaque, apparently did not include the solicitation of comments from the broader public such as business organizations or residents associations. Yet it is businesses and communities that have to bear the brunt of the problems that flow from many of these establishments. There have been numerous complaints recently of increased public drunkenness in Braamfontein following the opening of what were perceived as shebeens but which have now been found to have been granted licenses. Chatting to a senior Council official this week I gathered that licenses are being granted to shebeens operating from individual flats in residential developments. There are very real negative social consequences that arise from the abuse of liquor and to legitimise the sale of liquor in a residential apartment block is, I think, criminal.
Generally Council consent is also not sought when any form of entertainment is to be provided at these establishments leading to later complaints about noise, etc. Currently the advertising of the application to allow for objections is extremely unsatisfactory and doesn’t seek the comment of affected residents or businesses in the area. Key Council Departments are also not informed of the granting of licenses but the SAPS, JMPD and various council departments are expected to deal with the problems that emanate from places where liquor is sold as well as ensuring that permitted hours of operation are adhered to as well as checking that liquor is not sold to minors.
The policy points out that the current shebeen problem “is a legacy of our apartheid past and cannot be allowed to linger on indefinitely. Unless an end is brought about to the untenable situation it will be impossible to implement a meaningful liquor policy…….the present state of lawlessness and chaos in the industry cannot be allowed to continue.”
The policy therefore proposes that shebeeners will be given an opportunity to apply for a temporary trade permit which will later have to be converted to a shebeen license. This means that shebeens currently operating illegally in areas that are not zoned for such activity are going to be legalized in the short term without the applicants obtaining prior planning clearance from the local authority on matters of zoning or land use rights. This sets up a certain expectation in the applicant’s mind and leads to money being spent on extending buildings and upgrading facilities in order to qualify for a shebeen licence. They then learn that the Council will not support the application because it is not in accordance with planning or zoning requirements or because the Council feels that the facility will affect the adjacent landowners. So you create another illegal operation.
The new policy will, hopefully, address many of the current problems being experienced in the liquor industry but it appears as if it will introduce new ones as well. In my mind it again raises the overall issue of the interface between Provincial and Local Government. Here we have a Provincial authority directly impacting on the urban environment which is the responsibility of the council with little or no communication. We do persist in making it difficult to follow our urban regeneration needs from a united front.
The Pres comes to town.
I believe that President Thabo Mbeki will be spending this weekend in the metro and partly in the Inner City. The last time the President was here on Inner City business, that I know of, was in July 1997 when he announced the Inner City Vision – “The Golden Heartbeat of Africa” The Vision was the outcome of months of hard work by a large number of persons passionate about the inner city – members of the community, the business sector and some politicians and officials. The heartbeat was rather weak at that time, in fact the media constantly wanted us to believe that the patient had actually passed away – “Such and such flees the inner city – another nail in the inner city coffin”
This weekend he will undoubtedly be shown the results of the hard work that has gone into turning the Inner City around from the time he was here in 1997. Although the public and private sectors have made great strides together in the process, I trust that the Council will emphasise the major role that business has played sometimes against quite difficult odds.
For instance the base off which the regeneration has been developed has been the establishment of City Improvement Districts, a private sector initiative to ensure enhanced public environments by providing safety and security, maintenance and cleaning. Private sector money totaling many millions of rand per annum goes into maintaining these areas at a level far greater than the city can provide.
I trust that the President will be shown some of our continuing real problems when he is shown the successes - problems that haven’t been resolved for over a decade now – problems such as housing for the poor, unmanaged informal trading and taxis, badly maintained public space.
The President will evidently be meeting with ‘a representative group of business stakeholders’ on Saturday morning. Not sure who chose the representative group because all I have seen is an invitation to Johannesburg Chamber of Commerce and Industry members passed on to me by a colleague. The Chamber, whilst doing great work in many areas, with respect, has hardly been at the forefront of the renewal process.
Which makes me really worried that the people who should be meeting with the President, who have something to show and to tell, may not have been invited to the show. I started off doing a list but it’s dangerous to single people out by name even if their contribution has been special because the recovery of the city has, in so many ways, been a team effort.
But there are the private sector residential developers, the new breed of entrepreneurial developers and investors, the stalwarts who have stuck by the inner city through thick and thin, those running support institutions, those in the cultural sector, the community workers, the built environment professionals and academics, those who’ve fought passionately against the wholesale destruction of the city’s built heritage, etc etc etc. Apart from anything else, they are a colourful lot who would be able to provide the President with an accurate picture of the issues at the private/public sector interface.
There are a whole host of business people who have contributed to the process and it would be good for them to be able to say to the President, “when you launched the ‘golden heartbeat of Africa’ vision the patient was in great distress. Through a joint effort with the public sector the pulse is beating strongly again although, from time to time, it does fade a bit. Another few years and we’ll be able to remove the drip and declare the patient fully recovered.”
Don’t know if I’m becoming cynical in my old age but I suspect that many of the real movers and shakers in the process, both in the private and public sectors won’t crack an invite and an awful lot of people in both sectors who had nothing to do with the process will!
Ah, that’s life, best, neil
Likker is not always Lekker and the Pres comes to town
The three essential commodities that accompanied the early growth of Joeys were gold, liquor and sex. From a base of probably 200 people in the area at the time of the discovery of gold, the population skyrocketed to 26 000 within four years; 74 000 in ten and 620 000 in 40 years. At the end of four years there were 312 bars and many sex workers providing for the mainly male population. And as the gold was progressively reduced, the other two increased, exponentially! (I see that our National Commissioner of Police is now recommending that sex workers become legalized before 2010 and there is also a suggestion floating around that a red light district should be introduced in the Inner City.)
The bigger problem for the moment relates to the issuing of liquor licenses. I understand that there are more liquor licenses in Gauteng than the total of all the other provinces! Certainly the Inner City has seen a rash of indiscriminate liquor licenses being granted with absolutely no public consultation. International research has clearly demonstrated the linkages between the availability of liquor and levels of crime and violence. This past Easter weekend was accompanied by many ‘don’t drink and drive’ advertisements in acknowledgement of the fact that the majority of road accidents and fatalities can be linked to drivers under the influence of alcohol – recently these purportedly included a Chief of Police and a Judge!
Evidently the Provincial Government published a Draft Liquor Policy towards the end of last year – I say evidently because I certainly missed the notice and the process that was adopted, described by one inner-city colleague as opaque, apparently did not include the solicitation of comments from the broader public such as business organizations or residents associations. Yet it is businesses and communities that have to bear the brunt of the problems that flow from many of these establishments. There have been numerous complaints recently of increased public drunkenness in Braamfontein following the opening of what were perceived as shebeens but which have now been found to have been granted licenses. Chatting to a senior Council official this week I gathered that licenses are being granted to shebeens operating from individual flats in residential developments. There are very real negative social consequences that arise from the abuse of liquor and to legitimise the sale of liquor in a residential apartment block is, I think, criminal.
Generally Council consent is also not sought when any form of entertainment is to be provided at these establishments leading to later complaints about noise, etc. Currently the advertising of the application to allow for objections is extremely unsatisfactory and doesn’t seek the comment of affected residents or businesses in the area. Key Council Departments are also not informed of the granting of licenses but the SAPS, JMPD and various council departments are expected to deal with the problems that emanate from places where liquor is sold as well as ensuring that permitted hours of operation are adhered to as well as checking that liquor is not sold to minors.
The policy points out that the current shebeen problem “is a legacy of our apartheid past and cannot be allowed to linger on indefinitely. Unless an end is brought about to the untenable situation it will be impossible to implement a meaningful liquor policy…….the present state of lawlessness and chaos in the industry cannot be allowed to continue.”
The policy therefore proposes that shebeeners will be given an opportunity to apply for a temporary trade permit which will later have to be converted to a shebeen license. This means that shebeens currently operating illegally in areas that are not zoned for such activity are going to be legalized in the short term without the applicants obtaining prior planning clearance from the local authority on matters of zoning or land use rights. This sets up a certain expectation in the applicant’s mind and leads to money being spent on extending buildings and upgrading facilities in order to qualify for a shebeen licence. They then learn that the Council will not support the application because it is not in accordance with planning or zoning requirements or because the Council feels that the facility will affect the adjacent landowners. So you create another illegal operation.
The new policy will, hopefully, address many of the current problems being experienced in the liquor industry but it appears as if it will introduce new ones as well. In my mind it again raises the overall issue of the interface between Provincial and Local Government. Here we have a Provincial authority directly impacting on the urban environment which is the responsibility of the council with little or no communication. We do persist in making it difficult to follow our urban regeneration needs from a united front.
The Pres comes to town.
I believe that President Thabo Mbeki will be spending this weekend in the metro and partly in the Inner City. The last time the President was here on Inner City business, that I know of, was in July 1997 when he announced the Inner City Vision – “The Golden Heartbeat of Africa” The Vision was the outcome of months of hard work by a large number of persons passionate about the inner city – members of the community, the business sector and some politicians and officials. The heartbeat was rather weak at that time, in fact the media constantly wanted us to believe that the patient had actually passed away – “Such and such flees the inner city – another nail in the inner city coffin”
This weekend he will undoubtedly be shown the results of the hard work that has gone into turning the Inner City around from the time he was here in 1997. Although the public and private sectors have made great strides together in the process, I trust that the Council will emphasise the major role that business has played sometimes against quite difficult odds.
For instance the base off which the regeneration has been developed has been the establishment of City Improvement Districts, a private sector initiative to ensure enhanced public environments by providing safety and security, maintenance and cleaning. Private sector money totaling many millions of rand per annum goes into maintaining these areas at a level far greater than the city can provide.
I trust that the President will be shown some of our continuing real problems when he is shown the successes - problems that haven’t been resolved for over a decade now – problems such as housing for the poor, unmanaged informal trading and taxis, badly maintained public space.
The President will evidently be meeting with ‘a representative group of business stakeholders’ on Saturday morning. Not sure who chose the representative group because all I have seen is an invitation to Johannesburg Chamber of Commerce and Industry members passed on to me by a colleague. The Chamber, whilst doing great work in many areas, with respect, has hardly been at the forefront of the renewal process.
Which makes me really worried that the people who should be meeting with the President, who have something to show and to tell, may not have been invited to the show. I started off doing a list but it’s dangerous to single people out by name even if their contribution has been special because the recovery of the city has, in so many ways, been a team effort.
But there are the private sector residential developers, the new breed of entrepreneurial developers and investors, the stalwarts who have stuck by the inner city through thick and thin, those running support institutions, those in the cultural sector, the community workers, the built environment professionals and academics, those who’ve fought passionately against the wholesale destruction of the city’s built heritage, etc etc etc. Apart from anything else, they are a colourful lot who would be able to provide the President with an accurate picture of the issues at the private/public sector interface.
There are a whole host of business people who have contributed to the process and it would be good for them to be able to say to the President, “when you launched the ‘golden heartbeat of Africa’ vision the patient was in great distress. Through a joint effort with the public sector the pulse is beating strongly again although, from time to time, it does fade a bit. Another few years and we’ll be able to remove the drip and declare the patient fully recovered.”
Don’t know if I’m becoming cynical in my old age but I suspect that many of the real movers and shakers in the process, both in the private and public sectors won’t crack an invite and an awful lot of people in both sectors who had nothing to do with the process will!
Ah, that’s life, best, neil
Thursday, April 5, 2007
Council Responsibilities Citichat 5 April 2007
CITICHAT 13/2007 - 5 April 2007
Easter musings
Intriguing reports in the media this past week regarding the Kaserne Parking Garage in Harrison Street. The building had evidently been turned into an informal settlement housing hundreds of squatters and their families as well as a number of informal businesses. The latter included brothels and shebeens, food and cigarette sellers and a photocopying business servicing the adjacent Home Affairs building whose ‘customers’ are required to have copies made of a variety of documents. Some of the residents were clearly quite opportunistic even though the conditions they were living in were appalling - a JMPD officer is reported as saying that there were no ablution facilities inside the building ‘hence the stench’.
The story raises a number of issues. Clearly the illegal occupation had been going on for some time – I heard one comment of at least two years – why had it taken so long for action to have been taken? Then, the building is supposed to be used as a rank for taxis, where had they been ranking if not there and why hadn’t they raised the problem with the authorities? How does the city learn more timeously about such issues before they become problems?
Quite co-incidentally, as part of the run-up to the Inner City Summit and Charter, a workshop was held with a variety of stakeholders during this week to debate exactly these sorts of questions and to seek solutions.
Sitting listening to the talk around the table, I couldn’t help but think on just how much our so called civil society has disintegrated over the past number of decades and how this situation seems to be centered in our cities. We all know and acknowledge the root causes of the disintegration, but we are now in our thirteenth or fourteenth year of a democratic state and we seem to be getting worse not better. I wondered if in fact this ongoing deterioration isn’t due in a large way to the erratic permissiveness of local government. I use the term ‘erratic permissiveness’ because we seem to have developed a mentality of ignoring problems when they occur and then, only when they have developed beyond a certain level, we go in to sort them out. I call that a ‘blitz mentality’ – let things get so bad that you can no longer ignore them and then go in with all guns blazing. Subsequently fill the media with stories about how good we are – we cleared out X tons of waste from the area – we arrested Y number of known criminals/druglords etc., we sent Z number of illegal immigrants back to where they came from. No one seems to be asking why X tons of waste were allowed to accumulate in the area in the first place. Why authorities were not dealing with the criminals and illegal immigrants as a matter of course and not under a programme called “Operation Recover our Streets” soon to be forgotten and the situation allowed again to repeat.
What has consistently come out of a variety of workshops over the past few months is a plea to Council to do their job every day and not once in a while when things are out of hand. They have clearly taken the point as they are closely examining a new approach to the urban management of the city that should foster a day by day style. I say ‘should’ because there are, I believe, some structural difficulties inherent in the system. One of these is the divided accountability that comes from having intensified silo management by having created a whole range of ‘independent’ municipal entities. If departments didn’t talk to each other previously when they were all ‘in’ the same organization, the situation is so much worse now that the structure is fragmented. It leads me to wonder at how much time is actually spent by decision makers debating the possible negative consequences of their decisions. The political jerry-mandering of the metro area into four metro sub-structures in the mid ‘90s led to the ‘sharing out’ of council resources across the four areas, a situation from which, I believe, we have never recovered even though it was dropped five years later. The consequences included demoralised staff and lost systems and processes.
So here I am at a workshop where a suggestion is made that a system be implemented whereby every council official, irrespective of department or municipal entity, should report all incidents they come across, irrespective of their own discipline. Incidents such as accumulated piles of rubbish, electric street lights not working, pavements dug up and not fixed. Surely that is the responsibility of every council official anyway – the fact that one has to now design a process whereby a Pikitup truck driver reports a broken stop sign and a Joburg Water meter reader reports accumulated waste piles is to me a terrible indictment of the system. How many Council officials were aware of the festering Kazerne Parking Garage situation and said nothing? How many said something only to be ignored?
The discussion made me think back to when I had got my driver’s license (now some fifty years ago!) and how it was a time of courtesy and consideration for other users of the road. How traffic rules and regulations were to be obeyed and were! Crossing an unbroken line, going through stop streets or red traffic lights were virtually mortal sins whilst letting another car into vehicle queues was a normal courtesy. Today, every day, vehicles (and it’s not just taxis!) use the emergency lanes to ‘beat the traffic’, white lines are invisible, red traffic lights are green and if the queue to turn right is too long, start a new one in parallel and don’t worry about the line of drivers you are blocking behind you. Taxis deliberately block intersections, causing frustration and chaos – I’ve had occasion to drive over the Nelson Mandela Bridge a number of times this past week to repeatedly see taxis using the left lane, which gives access to the Queen Elizabeth Bridge from where they turn right to force themselves ahead of the queue at the traffic lights. At the junction of the M2 off-ramp and Jan Smuts Avenue there is a triangular designated no-go area at the intersection of the two roads that is now used as a ‘taxi lane’ to jump the queues! Get stuck behind a slow moving truck and those cars behind you are simply not prepared to hold back long enough to let you pull out to overtake the bottleneck!
Fifty years ago you didn’t even think of doing those things – you were taught good road manners and if you broke the law you were quickly penalized. After years of inaction we now fairly regularly see JMPD officers parked in the emergency lane of the freeway and, miracle of miracle, emergency lane users are few! Pity we don’t see JMPD officers at traffic intersections such as de Villiers and Rissik Streets, or at the Nelson Mandela Bridge or…………..! And when we see them around the corner of an off ramp ticketing cell phone users we note that on the other side of the street are dozens of squeegee operators intimidating drivers but ignored by the officers.
Articles that preceded the New York implementation of a “zero tolerance” approach argued that what might appear to be trivial irritations gives the impression that things are falling apart and leads one to feeling vulnerable about greater possible harms. A typical comment of that time; “If the city doesn’t care about one aspect of its citizens’ lives it probably doesn’t care about others.” In fact, as was later proved, ignoring aggressive begging, lackadaisical refuse collection, public drinking, excessive noise and de facto decriminalized drug selling led directly to soaring crime. “The devil-may-care atmosphere emboldened wrongdoers and a pervasive demoralization made ordinary New Yorkers anxious, pessimistic, alienated from civic life, slow to go into the city for pleasure, and quick to leave town for good.” Disorder gives the citizens of a city a sense that things are falling apart, that society is doomed, that there is no order in the universe nor in local government!
William Bratton, erstwhile police commissioner of both Boston and New York and one of those credited with the New York turnaround says; “They (the police) were openly giving freedom of the streets to the drug dealers, the gangs, the prostitutes, the drinkers and the radio blasters. A sense of fear and anarchy pervaded many neighbourhoods. The traditional order-keeping forces, the responsible adults in these communities, played less of a role as their own fear and uncertainty grew. They – along with the wrongdoers – had gotten the message that even the cops didn’t care, and they were understandably hesitant to put themselves on the line.”
Somehow we need to get back to a society that understands right from wrong and that breaking even minor laws will result in punishment. A society that collectively doesn’t allow parking garages to be turned into squatter settlements and brothels and a society that cares and provides for its disadvantaged citizens as much as for the advantaged. Till then, we will go ahead and continue to make great strides with repairing the fabric of the city but allowing its soul to slowly disintegrate.
Have a restful and blessed long- weekend, neil
.
Easter musings
Intriguing reports in the media this past week regarding the Kaserne Parking Garage in Harrison Street. The building had evidently been turned into an informal settlement housing hundreds of squatters and their families as well as a number of informal businesses. The latter included brothels and shebeens, food and cigarette sellers and a photocopying business servicing the adjacent Home Affairs building whose ‘customers’ are required to have copies made of a variety of documents. Some of the residents were clearly quite opportunistic even though the conditions they were living in were appalling - a JMPD officer is reported as saying that there were no ablution facilities inside the building ‘hence the stench’.
The story raises a number of issues. Clearly the illegal occupation had been going on for some time – I heard one comment of at least two years – why had it taken so long for action to have been taken? Then, the building is supposed to be used as a rank for taxis, where had they been ranking if not there and why hadn’t they raised the problem with the authorities? How does the city learn more timeously about such issues before they become problems?
Quite co-incidentally, as part of the run-up to the Inner City Summit and Charter, a workshop was held with a variety of stakeholders during this week to debate exactly these sorts of questions and to seek solutions.
Sitting listening to the talk around the table, I couldn’t help but think on just how much our so called civil society has disintegrated over the past number of decades and how this situation seems to be centered in our cities. We all know and acknowledge the root causes of the disintegration, but we are now in our thirteenth or fourteenth year of a democratic state and we seem to be getting worse not better. I wondered if in fact this ongoing deterioration isn’t due in a large way to the erratic permissiveness of local government. I use the term ‘erratic permissiveness’ because we seem to have developed a mentality of ignoring problems when they occur and then, only when they have developed beyond a certain level, we go in to sort them out. I call that a ‘blitz mentality’ – let things get so bad that you can no longer ignore them and then go in with all guns blazing. Subsequently fill the media with stories about how good we are – we cleared out X tons of waste from the area – we arrested Y number of known criminals/druglords etc., we sent Z number of illegal immigrants back to where they came from. No one seems to be asking why X tons of waste were allowed to accumulate in the area in the first place. Why authorities were not dealing with the criminals and illegal immigrants as a matter of course and not under a programme called “Operation Recover our Streets” soon to be forgotten and the situation allowed again to repeat.
What has consistently come out of a variety of workshops over the past few months is a plea to Council to do their job every day and not once in a while when things are out of hand. They have clearly taken the point as they are closely examining a new approach to the urban management of the city that should foster a day by day style. I say ‘should’ because there are, I believe, some structural difficulties inherent in the system. One of these is the divided accountability that comes from having intensified silo management by having created a whole range of ‘independent’ municipal entities. If departments didn’t talk to each other previously when they were all ‘in’ the same organization, the situation is so much worse now that the structure is fragmented. It leads me to wonder at how much time is actually spent by decision makers debating the possible negative consequences of their decisions. The political jerry-mandering of the metro area into four metro sub-structures in the mid ‘90s led to the ‘sharing out’ of council resources across the four areas, a situation from which, I believe, we have never recovered even though it was dropped five years later. The consequences included demoralised staff and lost systems and processes.
So here I am at a workshop where a suggestion is made that a system be implemented whereby every council official, irrespective of department or municipal entity, should report all incidents they come across, irrespective of their own discipline. Incidents such as accumulated piles of rubbish, electric street lights not working, pavements dug up and not fixed. Surely that is the responsibility of every council official anyway – the fact that one has to now design a process whereby a Pikitup truck driver reports a broken stop sign and a Joburg Water meter reader reports accumulated waste piles is to me a terrible indictment of the system. How many Council officials were aware of the festering Kazerne Parking Garage situation and said nothing? How many said something only to be ignored?
The discussion made me think back to when I had got my driver’s license (now some fifty years ago!) and how it was a time of courtesy and consideration for other users of the road. How traffic rules and regulations were to be obeyed and were! Crossing an unbroken line, going through stop streets or red traffic lights were virtually mortal sins whilst letting another car into vehicle queues was a normal courtesy. Today, every day, vehicles (and it’s not just taxis!) use the emergency lanes to ‘beat the traffic’, white lines are invisible, red traffic lights are green and if the queue to turn right is too long, start a new one in parallel and don’t worry about the line of drivers you are blocking behind you. Taxis deliberately block intersections, causing frustration and chaos – I’ve had occasion to drive over the Nelson Mandela Bridge a number of times this past week to repeatedly see taxis using the left lane, which gives access to the Queen Elizabeth Bridge from where they turn right to force themselves ahead of the queue at the traffic lights. At the junction of the M2 off-ramp and Jan Smuts Avenue there is a triangular designated no-go area at the intersection of the two roads that is now used as a ‘taxi lane’ to jump the queues! Get stuck behind a slow moving truck and those cars behind you are simply not prepared to hold back long enough to let you pull out to overtake the bottleneck!
Fifty years ago you didn’t even think of doing those things – you were taught good road manners and if you broke the law you were quickly penalized. After years of inaction we now fairly regularly see JMPD officers parked in the emergency lane of the freeway and, miracle of miracle, emergency lane users are few! Pity we don’t see JMPD officers at traffic intersections such as de Villiers and Rissik Streets, or at the Nelson Mandela Bridge or…………..! And when we see them around the corner of an off ramp ticketing cell phone users we note that on the other side of the street are dozens of squeegee operators intimidating drivers but ignored by the officers.
Articles that preceded the New York implementation of a “zero tolerance” approach argued that what might appear to be trivial irritations gives the impression that things are falling apart and leads one to feeling vulnerable about greater possible harms. A typical comment of that time; “If the city doesn’t care about one aspect of its citizens’ lives it probably doesn’t care about others.” In fact, as was later proved, ignoring aggressive begging, lackadaisical refuse collection, public drinking, excessive noise and de facto decriminalized drug selling led directly to soaring crime. “The devil-may-care atmosphere emboldened wrongdoers and a pervasive demoralization made ordinary New Yorkers anxious, pessimistic, alienated from civic life, slow to go into the city for pleasure, and quick to leave town for good.” Disorder gives the citizens of a city a sense that things are falling apart, that society is doomed, that there is no order in the universe nor in local government!
William Bratton, erstwhile police commissioner of both Boston and New York and one of those credited with the New York turnaround says; “They (the police) were openly giving freedom of the streets to the drug dealers, the gangs, the prostitutes, the drinkers and the radio blasters. A sense of fear and anarchy pervaded many neighbourhoods. The traditional order-keeping forces, the responsible adults in these communities, played less of a role as their own fear and uncertainty grew. They – along with the wrongdoers – had gotten the message that even the cops didn’t care, and they were understandably hesitant to put themselves on the line.”
Somehow we need to get back to a society that understands right from wrong and that breaking even minor laws will result in punishment. A society that collectively doesn’t allow parking garages to be turned into squatter settlements and brothels and a society that cares and provides for its disadvantaged citizens as much as for the advantaged. Till then, we will go ahead and continue to make great strides with repairing the fabric of the city but allowing its soul to slowly disintegrate.
Have a restful and blessed long- weekend, neil
.
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