Downtown gentrification steals from the poor to give to the rich
• Evicted Fattis Mansions residents live in tents despite owning their flats
Early in the morning of Wednesday July 19, 275 low-income residents were forcibly evicted from Fattis Mansions, a residential building in Johannesburg’s inner city.
Hundreds of Red Ants security guards hauled the residents’ possessions out into the middle of Harrison Street.
The vast majority of residents owned their apartments in the building, which was governed as a sectional title scheme.
Most of the apartments were bought with state housing subsidies granted during the mid- to late-1990s for R20,000R30,000 a unit.
The desperately poor residents had nowhere else to go.
Evictions like these remain prevalent in SA’s urban centres where poor people are being displaced as a result of state-run urban regeneration initiatives and gentrification.
That afternoon, the Fattis Mansions residents approached the Socio-Economic Rights Institute of SA (Seri) to help them overturn their eviction.
They were evicted on the basis of a court order granted on April 25 by the High Court in Johannesburg.
The order was handed down after the administrator of the sectional title scheme, Jan van den Bos, and Fairvest Property Two (a management company that owns 10 apartments in the building), made an urgent application to court for the building to be declared a “destroyed building” in terms of the Sectional Title Schemes Act and to authorise the eviction of its residents.
They claimed that the building was a “death trap” and an eviction order was in the interest of the occupiers.
But, although the building needs cleaning and various infrastructure upgrades, it is structurally sound. It is not a “death trap”.
It was immediately apparent that the residents at risk of being evicted were desperately poor and, if evicted, would be rendered homeless.
Before the judge granted the eviction order, the court called on the City of Johannesburg to say whether it could provide temporary alternative accommodation to the residents to ensure that they were not rendered homeless by the eviction.
On April 14, the council filed a report informing the court that it had no accommodation available. Despite this, the court granted the eviction and ordered the residents to vacate the building within 45 days.
Hours after the eviction had been carried out, Seri approached the High Court in Johannesburg urgently, asking
FATTIS MANSIONS IS PRIME REAL ESTATE. IT WOULD BE SHAMEFUL TO SEE IT TAKEN FROM THE POOR AND SOLD TO THE RICH
for the residents to be reinstated in the building pending a recision application, which would invalidate the eviction order if granted.
Judge Willem van der Linde heard the matter at 7pm, a mere seven hours after the residents had approached Seri.
The judge ordered the council to provide emergency temporary accommodation to the residents that evening, pending his judgment, which would be delivered the next morning.
Despite this, the council failed to assist residents. As a result, residents spent the night on the street.
The next morning, the judge dismissed the application for reinstatement, saying that he believed the building was a “death trap” and ordered the council to provide alternative accommodation to the residents by no later than July 27, even if that meant housing them in tents. On July 21, the residents were forcibly moved to Wem- mer shelter at gunpoint, while the council scrambled to procure tents.
Late in the night, two tents were set up. The council provided no cooking facilities and had no plan for a place the residents could go to next — and still does not. Van den Bos intends to renovate the building at a cost of millions by raising a special levy to be applied against the owners of its sectional title units.
As many of the residents will be unable to afford these high levies, this rehabilitation project will probably lead to owners being forced to sell their apartments to avoid rising debt and loss of equity or, if they cannot do this, losing their apartments through sales in execution. The situation is likely to render the residents vulnerable to exploitation by property speculators. The administrator recently bought units from three elderly women at R10,000 each — a fraction of what they cost the provincial government in the mid-1990s.
Fattis Mansions is prime real estate. It would be shameful to see it taken from the poor and sold to the rich. This seems likely to happen if there is no state intervention.
In 2014, the council promised to intervene. It informed Fairvest Property Two that it would expropriate the building and renovate it.
However, the council never delivered on its promise and now tries to avoid its constitutional obligations to provide housing to the poor.
If the council does nothing, the Fattis Mansions residents are likely to lose their apartments and will be left with no alternative accommodation.
This case illustrates the troubling dynamics around urban regeneration, gentrification and displacement, and highlights how gentrification is pushing the urban poor out of the council even when they have valid rights to property and own it.
It also emphasises the need for state intervention to deal with the negative effects associated with gentrification by ensuring that the poor retain their homes, combating displacement and tackling apartheid’s legacy of spatial injustice. The case also highlights the need for legal representation in eviction matters because, despite the Constitutional Court’s progressive housing jurisprudence, an eviction was granted against people who had a right to occupy the building they were living in and, as a result, were rendered homeless, something the Constitution enjoins courts and judges to guard against.
The immediate issue remains the city’s failure to provide alternative accommodation that affords people a measure of dignity.
The Fattis Mansions residents were evicted from their homes that, although imperfect, afforded privacy and an acceptable family life.
They now find themselves in tented council accommodation that is, on the whole, far worse than the “death trap” they were evicted from.
The council has failed not only in its positive obligations to provide adequate housing, but also in its negative obligations to ensure that there is no interference with existing housing.
The Fattis Mansions evictees are likely to remain in the inadequate tented accommodation for the foreseeable future.
Seri, in addition to overturning the evictions, will seek an order to ensure the Gauteng government and council take steps to renovate the building and place it back in the hands of its residents and owners.
The Fattis Mansions example is not unique. In its campaign against “hijacking” of buildings, the council raids targeted buildings after which it prepares a report decrying the overall state of the building and setting out average numbers of occupants and their combined household incomes.
The report then finds its way to the owner of the building who uses it as grounds for eviction of the residents, arguing that the council has inspected the building during the raid and found it to be a “death trap”.
In failing to stop the evictions in the Fattis Mansions scenario, is the council not aiding administrators such as Van den Bos to effectively steal from the poor?