| Neil Fraser visits San Jose |
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| Written by Neil Fraser | |
| Monday, 01 September 2008 | |
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Occupiers of the degraded inner city building, San Jose, have moved after a court battle and successful negotiations with the City.
San Jose is a block of sectional title flats on Olivia Street, Berea - or was! One wing is 14 floors high and the other is 10. The building was abandoned by its various sectional title owners quite some years ago - I would imagine in the mid-to-late 1990s when the residential scenario in places like Hillbrow and Berea went through dramatic and often violent change. Many such buildings were occupied by those desperate to have a roof, any roof, over their heads. Some were "organised" by chancers and gangsters always ready to exploit those in need. I remember, around that time, visiting a house in Bertrams - three-bedroomed and let to 75 people at R200 a month! Like many others it was without basic services, the R15 000 income a month going straight into the pocket of only one person, less the R1 500 a month he was paying the actual owner for rent and whatever bribe moneys he was doling out for officials to turn a blind eye! San Jose reached a desperate state of degradation some years back. With no services, occupiers had to walk down flight after flight of stairs to fill buckets with water, then climb back to their units carrying the full buckets where the water could be used to flush their toilets. The waste would end up in the basement which had become a huge sewer. The exterior looked "shattered" with missing and broken windows, rusting and decaying. "So why would anyone even think of living under such conditions?" is the first thing that comes to the minds of all of those who have never experienced what it means to be really poor. In 2005, the Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions (COHRE), an international human rights NGO, published a report Any Room for the Poor? that dealt with forced evictions in Johannesburg. The report's profile of the occupants of Joburg's "bad buildings" was that they were the poorest and most vulnerable residents in the inner city; many performing poorly paid jobs either in the formal sector or subsistence earners in the informal sector.
No choice I visited one of the units on Saturday, 23 August and found a pride of place that seemed in stark contrast to the encompassing conditions. Here poor people had created homes for themselves and their families - neat and tidy and clean. Whatever the state of the building and its immediate surrounds, it represented home - more than just a roof over the heads of the occupiers. On the day, the saga in the "battle of San Jose" moved into what will hopefully be its final chapter, with many people a great deal wiser than they were at the start. The occupiers, those who have been at the centre of the saga for a long, long time, were about to start a new chapter. The City originally clearly looked at the building as a major stumbling block to the achievement of the Inner City Regeneration Strategy in which it would have been labelled a "sinkhole". Little thought would have been given to the people occupying the building. The public was becoming used to seeing media articles about the infamous "red ants" evicting people from buildings like these, leaving them with their meagre possessions on the pavement to be carted off to Orange Farm or some other informal settlement miles away from the city, or left to find their own alternative accommodation in similar circumstances to those from which they had been evicted. In a way one must sympathise with a local government under pressure to restore a sense of order to a city that had been allowed to decay so badly.
Unsafe In 2006, a high court ruling addressed San Jose and similar cases. Judge J Jajbhay introduced his judgment as follows: "The consequences of rendering a person homeless in the circumstances postulated in this case have a very wide reach. It affects the very quality of a person's life, dignity and a person's freedom and security." He then went on to quote from the United Nations Housing Rights Programme: "To live in a place, and to have established one's own personal habitat with peace, security and dignity, should be considered neither a luxury, a privilege nor purely the good fortune of those who can afford a decent home. Rather, the requisite imperative of housing for personal security, privacy, health, safety, protection from the elements and many other attributes of a shared humanity, has led the international community to recognise adequate housing as a basic and fundamental human right." The judge recognised that, while many states had adopted and ratified these human rights, "their implementation appears to present difficulties for homeless people". He then stressed that a state had a duty to "immediately address the housing needs of its respective population, if any significant number of individuals are deprived of basic shelter and housing. To do otherwise is considered a prima facie violation of the right to adequate housing." In commenting in regard to the buildings affected in the hearing, including San Jose, all of which had been visited by the judge, he stated that "The Applicant's Inner City Regeneration Strategy will affect thousands of poor occupiers in the inner city in this way." He conceded, however, that, "where occupiers have been occupying the building for some time (such as in the present instance) has to be looked at with far greater sympathy than those who deliberately invade the buildings with a view to disrupting a housing regeneration programme contemplated by a municipality." There is an interesting quote from another ruling - "What is really a welfare problem gets converted into a property one."
Final judgment The City took the judgment to the Supreme Court of Appeal for review, and the resultant judgment was handed down in March 2007. It, in fact, now granted the eviction order but ordered that those evicted must be provided with "temporary" accommodation somewhere in the Johannesburg area. The occupiers instituted a further appeal against this ruling, directing their appeal to the highest court in the land, the Constitutional Court. Their legal representatives felt that the Appeal Court judgment did not sufficiently safeguard the residents' constitutional rights by making the execution of the eviction order conditional on genuine consultation and the provision of alternative shelter. They also argued that the judgment did not instruct the City to have a Housing Plan for the many residents of similar buildings in the city. The Constitutional Court heard the case in August 2007, reserving final judgment and ordered that the representatives of the residents and the City should engage meaningfully to firstly improve the conditions in the building on a short-term basis and then to find alternative accommodation for those who would have to leave. Final judgment was handed down in February 2008. Between these dates and the present, the somewhat antagonistic relationship between the parties ameliorated as they started working towards a common goal. A good working relationship was ultimately forged between officials of the City, the CALS and the community involved through their strong residents' committee. A huge amount of effort was made before the move to ensure that each occupant knew where he or she was being moved to - room assignments, lease agreements, house rules and the procedures of the move were all agreed to so that there should be minimal confusion during and after the event.
New homes This was all encapsulated in the Inner City Charter that had been developed during 2006/7 following wide consultation. The charter, which was signed in July 2007, contains the following specific commitments:
While being late on delivery, the current situation is that some 1 250 beds have now, in fact, been made available in a variety of buildings refurbished or converted for such accommodation. And it was to these buildings that the occupiers of San Jose were moved. Thus last Saturday morning we witnessed the first truck laden with previous San Jose residents with their belongings move into the converted previous Perm building on the corner of Kotze and Claim streets, in Hillbrow, and the MBV building, a converted hospital, opposite Joubert Park. Unlike the terrible scenes surrounding evictions this was a celebration - those on the trucks waving at those left behind waiting their turn. The move took all day until San Jose was empty. Ciao, Neil Related stories: |
