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On his regular monthly visits to Joburg, Neil Fraser keeps a check on what is happening in the inner city.
ONE of the interesting aspects of visiting Jozi one week a month is that one's senses are much more heightened to what is and isn't happening in the city. So my last week's visit was a really interesting one with a number of issues to share with you.
First of all, "the walls have come tumblin' down" and, although Beyers Naude Square is still a work in progress, one can already experience the emergence of the positive urban space it once was instead of the urban design calamity imposed on us.
From some mail I received, it appears the ‘Eddy Magid plan' was probably approved either late in 1988 or early in 1989 and the structures went up soon thereafter. Can you believe it - they have been blighting the city for 20 years! Mind you, the City did decide to move out of the CBD in the early 1950s and accomplished this in the early 1970s, so 20 years may, in fact, be a good time-frame for local government delivery!
We started working on trying to get the Rissik Street Post Office refurbished in 1994/5, so I guess we'll still have to wait a few years for any action there as 20 years will take us up to 2014/15! And no, I don't have any news and the building looks sadder and more and more dilapidated every time I see it!
Barbican
Talking of dilapidated, the Barbican building diagonally opposite the post office is nothing but a big disappointment. On the one hand one almost expects the public sector to take decades to get off their bottoms, but for an historic building like the Barbican, in the hands of one of South Africa's major financial houses, Old Mutual, to have been allowed to decay as it has, is nothing short of disgraceful.
That the organisation also advertises itself as "green thinking" and "environmentally aware" shows that it has no respect for the citizens of this great city, let alone its shareholders.
I mentioned in Citichat Overview - inner city progress 2
at least a year ago that I'd seen the plans and model of what had been proposed for the Barbican and the surrounding "Palace" site of which it is part. It includes new retail and commercial space with a large provision for parking which is desperately needed in the inner city. That the owner was waiting for a major client to take the commercial space before proceeding is understandable, especially in the current climate, but why it doesn't go ahead with the parking, retail and restoration of the Barbican itself, is beyond me.
Parking
My concern regarding city parking was increased when I drove through the streets where the BRT has been completed. What we appear to have at the moment is the central BRT lane and then two lanes on either side of the central lane, one of which is used for parking. In order for any kind of traffic flow to work, the BRT lane itself is being used by everyone – once it is dedicated to buses only, the parking on either side of the street must surely be given over as a traffic lane and the amount of on-street parking will be further negatively affected.
(Surely the City should close the BRT lanes to traffic now, so that all can get used to the new traffic flow and the problems it will bring with it. Just look at the damage already done to the 'rumble strips' that separate the BRT from other vehicles! We have a history of non-implementation of implementable issues until it is so late that implementation is compromised.)
As it is, street parking is a joke because it is so little policed and the parking meters haven't worked for years. As the city has gone through its urban renewal phase, so parking has become a greater and greater problem. Hence the appearance since the early 2000s of probably 8 000 parking bays:
- Liberty Life, Braamfontein, 370 bays;
- Constitution Hill superbasement, 1 860 bays;
- 430 bays underground at the junction of Ameshoff and Simmonds Streets for Sappi staff (305 shared with the Joburg Theatre at night for its patrons);
- 350 bays for the JD Group, also in Braamfontein;
- Parking garage for FNB at Bank City - 1 012 bays completed a couple of years back and more under construction, probably an additional 1 000 bays;
- 1 000 bays at the Standard Bank superblock;
- Staff parking garage of 830 bays at the Absa campus; and
- The AAC parking garage in Marshalltown – 1 000 bays.
With those I don't know about, it is probably 8 000 bays provided since 2004 but, apart from the Constitution Hill and Central Place parking, both outside the city centre, all the balance is corporate employee parking. The fact that the provincial government was planning for an additional 5 000 bays underground in its now-abandoned precinct scheme shows how desperately short we are of centrally placed parking provision.
What will exacerbate the problem is the high rate of conversion of office blocks to residential, where the existing buildings have very little if any parking provision and developers can get away with a lack of parking because their tenants are not necessarily car owners at this point - but this will surely change over time and put more pressure on the parking situation.
The argument will be, "surely, BRT will be the answer". But will it? Firstly, the system, hopefully up and running for 2010, is very much an inner city system – how long before the city to Sunninghill section is built is anybody's guess - and provides some real difficulties in regard to routing. Secondly, the likelihood of executive types using the BRT as a matter of choice is, in my opinion, doubtful.
Residential
Investment in residential appears not to be slowing down. The YMCA corner of Rissik and Smit streets is being refurbished into a mixed-use development that will include 200 residential units.
On 19 July on television, on Real Estate on channel 410, there was a preview of The Silos in Newtown – the conversion of the historic grain silos into residential accommodation. As was mentioned in the programme, this follows a large international trend and I remember visiting a silo-conversion in Denver, in Colorado some years back which was highly successful.
Had a drive around the new Zurich Re building in Marshalltown, which is an iconic addition to the city's prestige buildings, and also heard that discussions have again started on the upgrading of the adjacent Chinatown. Positive stuff!
I also heard on the grapevine that Elizabeth House on the corner of Pritchard and Sauer streets, and next to Chief Albert Luthuli House (ANC HQ) is being looked at for conversion to the provincial premier's offices – if so at least they have chosen a building that appears to have little historic value. It was built in 1952 on the site of the 1920s Arundel Hotel.
The provincial government refurbishing exercise of the buildings previously slated for demolition appears to be proceeding apace. The New Library Hotel building, on the corner of Commissioner and Fraser streets, appears to have been gutted while a number of others, including First National House on the corner of Market and Simmonds streets, is in the process. As far as I could see the building's ground-floor terracotta-coloured sculptural panels have gone - carefully removed or demolished? This was some early work of Edoardo Villa and was the inspiration for literally hundreds of decorative relief panels that subsequently appeared on numerous buildings in Johannesburg.
The building was designed by Monty Sack. Sack, who sadly passed away recently, was a truly humble human being who contributed greatly to the built environment of this city that he loved. Clive Chipkin (Joburg Style) says this of the architect and building: "In Johannesburg, the most accomplished interpretation of the new building technology associated with curtain-wall corporate America was to be found in the work of Monty Sack. Sack was the architect chosen to project the second-generation image of the Schlesinger Organisation, an insurance, banking and property empire owning some of the ‘finest blue-chip sites in the country' …
"In Monty Sack the Schlesinger executives found the perfect instrument for their drive to modernity: second-generation Schlesinger modernity. Sack confirms that in the 1950s and 1960s he was strongly influenced by developments in North America, particularly by ‘functionalist buildings expressing mechanical systems on the façade'. He visited New York in 1957 and returned home with ideas which came to fruition in his subsequent work.
"The first fruits of the American visit were the near-contemporaries built in the same historic city block: the Colonial Bank Building (1958-9) in Market Street (at the corner of Simmonds), a neighbour to the face brick Volkskas building: and the African Guarantee Building (1960) at the corner of Commissioner and Fraser streets – the first precast-clad building on a podium. The two buildings, though quite different in appearance, nevertheless reflected a single design intelligence – the same sense of proportion and elegance, the same restraint in the use of materials."
Sack, with his great skills as architect and artist, his love for and contribution to Johannesburg, will be sorely missed.
Jerusalema
Over the weekend I watched the film Jerusalema ("If you're going to steal ... Steal big, and hope like hell you get away with it!"). Yes, the DVD has reached Montagu and graphically depicts the building hijacking that has been experienced in Hillbrow, Berea and elsewhere. Prior to the hijackings many of the buildings were allowed to degenerate so I was very interested to read an article of 15 July 2009 in the New York Times.
This is a condensed version:
"Struggling landlords leaving repairs undone
"As property owners run into trouble paying their mortgages, neighbourhoods around New York City
have been witnessing a disturbing consequence: small and large apartment buildings are being abandoned in a state of disrepair, leaving tenants in limbo without basic services or even landlords.
"In the Bronx, anybody can walk into a four-storey building on East 178th Street near the Cross-Bronx Expressway. Someone took the front door off the hinges and sold it for scrap metal. Drugs have been sold out of vacant apartments.
"'A nightmare'" said Cesar Guzman, 29, who lives in the building. 'I can't describe it as anything else.'
"In Brooklyn, a woman at 76 Newport Street said the landlord disappeared this year and stopped collecting rent, so she stopped paying it. A 19-year-old man in Apartment 1F has become the unofficial superintendent, sealing holes in ceilings with cardboard and duct tape.
"Many of these landlords, particularly those who bought in recent years when the real estate market was at its peak, are struggling to make mortgage payments, let alone pump thousands of dollars into buildings for repairs. Elected officials and tenant advocates place much of the blame for the distress of multifamily apartment buildings not on landlords, but on the lenders who financed many of those now in default, saying the loans for the properties were based on shoddy lending practices and unrealistic projections of rising rents.
"Many of these overleveraged buildings — the agency does not have precise numbers — are made up of low-income tenants in rent-regulated or subsidised apartments. International developers and private equity firms have borrowed hundreds of millions of dollars to buy buildings with rent-regulated units in the belief that they could profit by replacing existing residents with higher-paying ones, a trend tenant advocates call predatory equity."
Interestingly descriptive new phrase brought about by the economic slump - "predatory equity"!
As always is the case, none of our problems are unique. It does depend, however, on how you fix them!
Cheers, Neil
Kensington 4 Charity Fun Run
An advance notice of the 2009 Kensington 4 Charity Fun Run to be held on 30 August from 8am to 6pm in Queen Street business district, Kensington south, to support four major Kensington projects and underprivileged kids. Check out the Kensington Tourism website.
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