Bottom+line+rights,+not+quick+profit,+Stuart+Wilson,+Business+Day

Business Day, Johannesburg, 24 March 2006
=Bottom line is rights, not a quick profit=


 * Stuart Wilson**

ON MARCH 3, the Johannesburg High Court effectively banned the City of Johannesburg from evicting large numbers of poor people, without providing alternative housing, from “bad” buildings in the inner city. This, as reported in this paper, has raised “investor fears”, and could see some business people “taking their money elsewhere”.

Assuming the city can get its act together and start providing alternatives, there is no real conflict between long-term economic stability and implementing the high court’s ruling.

As recent research from the Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions and the Centre for Applied Legal Studies has shown, evicting poor people, without alternatives, from “bad” buildings does nothing to reduce the total number of slums in the inner city. This is so because, after sometimes long periods of homelessness, evictees invariably move into — or create a demand for — other slums in the area.

Ironically, this is because the occupiers of “bad” buildings have to live in the inner city to serve the needs of investors. They pump petrol. They guard and clean buildings. They recycle trash. Their income from doing this (about R1000 a month a household on average) precludes them from being able to afford to live in a peripheral location and pay the costs of commuting daily into the inner city.

Sadly, it also precludes them from being able to afford accommodation in any of the buildings private investors wish to run.

So many of them opt to live for little or nothing in unsafe, unhealthy and altogether “bad” buildings. Rehousing them in decent, safe, affordable accommodation will make for a cleaner, safer city, more attractive to investors.

All the high court judgment has done is force the city to face up to this task. That is something we should all be applauding.

Unfortunately, the “fears” raised persist. There are two lines of argument — hinted at by CEO of property rental company Trafalgar, Neville Schaefer, and the unnamed figure from the city who was quoted in the article — that require correction.

The first argument is this: the judgment will adversely affect the relationship between landlords and tenants in the inner city. Neither Schaefer nor Jo’burg’s mystery official explain exactly how this relationship will be affected.

This is not surprising, because the ruling had nothing to do with the laws governing the relationship between landlord and tenant.

The question on which the case eventually turned was whether the city is entitled to exercise its powers to evict people from buildings it deems to be unsafe:


 * Without even considering the ability of those people to find alternative accommodation; and,
 * Without having a plan to rehouse people evicted from “bad” buildings who are too poor to rehouse themselves.

The high court’s answer was a resounding “no”. Now, this answer might create a technical problem for the city, but it has nothing to do with the legal relationship between landlords and tenants. This relationship was altered not one bit by the judgment.

This brings us to the second argument. Schaefer says that the judgment sets a “worrying precedent”, namely that “the council will now have to develop a sound housing policy and provide alternative accommodation within the inner city before being able to evict occupants”.

This precedent does not worry me. Nor is it likely to worry the 70000 or so people who are living in “bad” buildings in the inner city and who would be rendered homeless in its absence. But, nor, really, does it worry Shaefer. What in fact worries him — in his own words — is that the provision of alternatives “could take years, even decades”.

Yet this is not a criticism of the judgment. It is an indictment of the city’s dismal failure to provide housing for the inner-city poor on any appreciable scale. There is no reason why such housing should take years to provide. The high court did not order the city to house all the inner-city poor now. It said if the city wants to remove people from an unsafe building, then it must provide alternative accommodation for those who cannot do so for themselves.

The city has billions of rand, powers of expropriation and a sophisticated administrative structure. Largely as a result of being sued in this case, it has already set aside R40m to house 4000 of the inner-city poor over the next four years.

Schaefer’s unarticulated worry, though, may be that the city has neither the political will nor the administrative competence to comply fully with the judgment. If this is so, there might indeed be an inconvenient wait for the city to provide alternatives before any further slum upgrades can take place.

But, to use language any investor will understand, the bottom line is this: in a constitutional state, it is impermissible to sacrifice basic rights for mere convenience. In this case, the rights of thousands of poor people in the inner city cannot be violated for the convenience of a few investors looking for a quick return.


 * Wilson is a research officer at the Centre for Applied Legal Studies.


 * From: http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/opinion.aspx?ID=BD4A174608**

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