Joburg’s faded glory on show in city grime
Inner-city buildings have been allowed to sink into lawlessness
● The satellite dishes that decorate many of Johannesburg’s inner-city residential buildings like fairy lights suggest a passable standard of living seldom found inside those same dwellings.
That is because hundreds of inner-city buildings are unlawfully occupied, hijacked or abandoned, have had their basic services cut and have not been maintained in years.
Standing outside the abandoned San Jose building in Berea, a part of the inner city once described as “little New York”, Nelson Khethani reminisced about his former home.
For nearly four decades Khethani has seen the decline of the CBD that is home to the continent’s second-largest urban economy.
Once thriving — but largely exclusive, due to apartheid policies of the time — parts of the city now resemble slums.
In Jeppestown, Joubert Park and Hillbrow, streets are lined with human and organic waste; dirty water puddles connect rows of derelict buildings.
Last week, Johannesburg mayor Herman Mashaba said he would resort to expropriation without compensation in a bid to rid inner-city buildings of the syndicates that had hijacked them and turned them into slums.
Remnants of the heyday of some of Johannesburg’s oldest suburbs are still visible in the architecture and iconic names that stretch across the city.
Talking to the Sunday Times on the broken steps of San Jose, where cult series Yizo Yizo 2 was filmed, Khethani remembers streets so clean “you would not even find a matchstick on the ground”.
He said: “This place was so safe and you could walk around at night without being afraid of getting robbed. I miss it.”
He moved to the city in 1980.
“When I first came [to the city] the rent was R40 for a two-bedroom apartment. Now it’s about R4 800 with a R10 000 deposit for a decent one.
“Around 1993 the maintenance and condition of the buildings started to drop. Landlords started to leave as more and more people moved to the city at the end of apartheid.”
For Hlengiwe Mhlambo, the conditions at the Kiribilly block of flats, where she lives with her two children, epitomise the state of housing for the poor in the inner city.
There is sewage on the first floor where children run and play.
The dark, narrow stairways to her fifthstorey room are intersected by corridors of broken windows that look into hollow apartments which don’t reflect the presence of the roughly 200 people who call the building home.
“This place is not orderly,” Mhlambo said. “Anyone who wants to break the law does it. It’s lawless. Criminals run in here to hide when they commit crimes and there is nothing we can do.”
But inner-city buildings were also dynamic spaces, are places of innovation and community, according to Margot Rubin, a senior researcher at the South African Research Chair in Spatial Analysis and City Planning at the University of the Witwatersrand.
Lack of regulation
“What we’re talking about is an environment which is extremely vibrant, with a number of activities that are going on all the time,” Rubin said. “It’s unregulated and that’s what allows these things to happen, but it’s also problematic.”
Rubin said that while buildings were technically abandoned, they were used in other ways, with residential use the most frequent.
Rooms were often subdivided or partitioned “with everything from bookcases to sheets or drywalling” which people then rented out.
“You can literally rent a space on the floor, you can rent a bed, a room or even half of a room. But you also have a whole lot of other things going on that can happen in parallel or sequentially.
“For example, rooms or spaces are used for home-based enterprises like food preparation, crèches, churches and even coffee shops. A lot of basements and old parking lots have been rejigged into places where you have live chickens, an aftercare, or people doing welding and upholstery.”
For Khethani, who has been living in a city-owned transitional building for 10 years after the city removed residents from the San Jose in 2008, the only thing that could uplift the inner city is the proper enforcement of bylaws.
“These buildings need proper management and the city has to enforce the bylaws,” he said.
“There is no such thing as safety in these buildings. Crime, drugs, robbery and theft are everywhere.”