The Seven Buildings look like many other blocks of flats in the inner city - unremarkable. Dull and moribund, their crumbling façades and broken windows blend easily into the city's dark underbelly.

But over a decade ago South Africa's social housing movement pinned its hopes on the 2,500 tenants of these buildings in Hillbrow, Joubert Park and Berea as the answer to the rebirth of the inner city.

The Seven Buildings Project (SBP) would transform the mostly poor residents of the combined 400 slum-style apartments of Argyle Court, Branksome Towers, Coniston Court, Manhattan Court, Margate Court, Protea Court and Stanhope Mansions into joint owners of their buildings in a collective housing scheme, the scale of which the country had not yet seen.

Not only would the SBP dress the inner city in its best, but it was hoped it would usher in a new era of city housing by serving as a model for future affordable projects. In 1996, the project was officially inaugurated when the tenants became the first recipients of an institutional housing subsidy in South Africa, a veritable coup for the social housing landscape.

"The SBP was the shining light of social housing," remembers Clive Cope, the former project manager. "There was a grand scheme behind it. If it worked well as a social housing initiative, we planned to roll it out in the rest of the inner city and bring other poor city residents into the social housing fold."

But it never made it that far.

In 2000, the tenants of five buildings overthrew the original board of directors of the Seven Buildings Company (SBC), the company created to own and manage the buildings, and fired the management team after the board proposed a 7 percent rent increase.

Since then the project has witnessed the rise and fall of four successive boards. A recent forensic audit report by the Gauteng Department of Housing has fingered at least two former directors of one of these "illegitimate" boards for fraud and corruption, according to Rory Gallagher, the department's social housing director.

In January 2002, the Johannesburg High Court liquidated the SBC. The liquidation order was filed by a major creditor, the Inner City Housing Upgrade Trust (Ichut), an organisation created in 1993 to provide short-term bridging finance to inner city residents. Ichut moved only after the tenants defaulted on its R3.6 million loan to upgrade their rundown buildings.

The liquidated company had also notched up R4 million in water and electricity arrears to the City of Johannesburg - money that seemed unlikely to be recovered. In October last year, the council decided to include all the seven buildings in its Better Buildings Programme (BBP), designed to woo new investors to buy decrepit debt-ridden buildings and revamp them.

In turn, according to Skhumbuzo Ndumndum, the programme manager for institutional housing, the council would write off the outstanding arrears, either partly or wholly. But Ndumndum says it was a "complex situation" as the council did not receive proposals from potential buyers.

On February 28, Ichut decided to cut its losses and sell the buildings at a public auction. Four were sold to private landlords and one was purchased by the Johannesburg Housing Company (JHC). The tenants of Argyle and Coniston courts, who Ndumndum says have a good track record in paying rent, bought their buildings.

"It is good that the buildings are changing hands to new owners," says Ndumndum. "I hope that they are the right investors and that they take care of the necessary reinvestment in the buildings and manage them in the right way."

Tenants, chief architects and housing experts all offer different reasons for the project's collapse. Tracy Cull, a tutor at Wits who is completing her master's degree on the SBP, believes the project was too big to sustain itself and that cross-subsidisation signalled its end. "It involved too many tenants living in buildings spread out across the city - a problem was that they didn't know each other. When one building needed an upgrade, the remaining buildings were liable for the cost, and this created resentment."

Others believe that the project's practice of hiring tenants to work as cleaners, security guards and supervisors contributed to the fall of the project. Towards the end, former taxi drivers were transformed into company directors overnight, not even knowing how to read a balance sheet. And almost all involved in the project cite violence from political factionalism.

Caroline Lethlatle, a resident of Protea Court since 1988, is adamant that collective housing is not the answer to cure the city of its housing ailments. "If I don't pay rent, it's not fair that my neighbour will also have her electricity cut off. Why should we suffer because other people don't pay their bills? It's different when you're paying for something that belongs to you, but our buildings never really belonged to us."

Michael Oelofse, the former operations housing manager for Ichut, agrees. "That's the problem with collective housing. It is based on the premise that rights and obligations are shared. However, it is too tempting for one person to break ranks to their own advantage, and shift obligations to others."

Johannesburg News Agency