If you want a city to work you need to have mixed-income accommodation, according to Neil Fraser Property Reporter

MANY upmarket developments are under way in Cape Town's city centre, but is enough attention being paid to the establishment of mixedincome developments to achieve greater integration?

There is room for improvement, says Neil Fraser, who is executive director of the Central Johannesburg Partnership, a nonprofit company dedicated to the revitalisation and regeneration of the inner city of Johannesburg, and director of Kagiso Urban Management, a company that provides urban management and urban regeneration solutions to communities throughout SA.

Fraser says that in Cape Town there is a "gigantic amount of upmarket"

residential units in the city centre, but if you want a city to work you need to have mixed-income accommodation.

"You need high income, middle income and low income. That is what our aim is in Johannesburg," he says.

Fraser believes the issue is being tackled better in Johannesburg with a number of mixed-income developments under way.

One that has been written about a great deal is the Brickfields Housing Project being developed by the Johannesburg Housing Company (JHC) in Newtown.

The Brickfields project will provide the first high-rise residential buildings to be erected in the inner city in about 30 years.

Fraser says this is a good example of mixed-income housing.

He says the better buildings programme of the City of Johannesburg's property arm, the Joburg Property Company (JPC), is involved in largely lower-income and middleincome housing developments.

Last October, Business Day reported that through its better buildings programme, headed by Geoff Mendelowitz, the JPC was making huge strides in Hillbrow in its efforts to rejuvenate "bad buildings" in the inner city.

Two hotels, the Mimosa and Rondebosch, were cleared of people staying there illegally, and are being transformed into social housing.

Fraser does welcome upmarket developments in the inner city, but says that he is concerned about how much is being erected in Cape Town. "If one is going to have a lot of higher-income units, then maybe the developers of these units have got to set aside either funding for middle to lower-income or space for them within the developments."

Fraser points out that developers in the UK those involved in projects more out of town than in the inner city have to build a certain number of low-cost starter homes at each development.

"In the very big developments the developers also contribute to the cost or themselves build schools and other amenities like libraries and community halls," Fraser says.

The thinking behind this, Fraser says, is that the developer makes a profit from the units, but is also obliged to put some money back into the community.

He says that is how it works in Dublin, Ireland.

"In Cape Town, at face value it looks like all the money is going into high-income residential units in the inner city. If that is so, then I am just querying whether that is the model for SA."

If you have a model where all the people living in the inner city have higher incomes, he says, then you are really persisting with the apartheid model, which is not good for this country.

"In SA we desperately need our cities to be properly integrated, given our past."

Fraser says he believes SA should investigate the models being used in Britain and Ireland.

The City of Cape Town was not available for comment.

May 12 2004 07:20:11:000AM Nick Wilson Business Day 1st Edition