Brickfields is outpost of progress in inner city blighted by neglect 
John Reed

Financial Times

JOHANNESBURG’s Brickfields housing development is a showpiece for a country that prides itself on enlightened social policies. Located at the foot of the city’s Nelson Mandela Bridge in Newtown, it comprises three clusters of tidy three- and four-storey walk-ups and nine-storey tower blocks, built around inviting courtyards.

Brickfields was built with the help of a state subsidy and 30% of flats are set aside for poor tenants who pay rents 20% below the market rate. Its residents are both blue- and white-collar workers and mostly — but not exclusively — black, making it a model of postapartheid integration.

SA was praised in a recent United Nations report for its “consistent political commitment” to slum upgrading and provision for the urban poor. Since the end of apartheid in 1994, African National Congress (ANC) governments have built about 2-million subsidised houses nationwide. The country’s strong tax base means it has a welfare budget that poorer African neighbours can only envy.

A short walk east from Brickfields, however, Hillbrow district presents a decidedly uglier aspect. It is a sinkhole of overcrowding, violent crime and decay.

Some buildings have been without power, water or sewerage for years, hijacking of properties by criminal gangs is common, as is piling 10 or more tenants into a single flat.

The contrasts on display in SA’s largest city owe something to the country’s unique and tumultuous recent history, which up-ended apartheid’s repressive controls on movement.

However, Johannesburg’s problems are not unusual in middle-income developing countries. The city, with a population of about 3-million at the hub of the country’s richest province, is a magnet for rural and foreign migrants. From 1996 to 2001 its population grew 4,1% a year, more than twice the national rate.

Local officials have struggled to keep up with the influx. In order to meet the ANC’s pledge to eliminate shacks and other substandard housing by 2014, Johannesburg would need to build about 48000 new units a year. It has averaged only 14000 a year recently, according to Uhuru Nene, the city’s executive director of housing.

While some poor Jo’burgers brave dire conditions in Hillbrow to be near to their jobs, many more have been pushed to shacks or subsidised houses on the distant periphery. The result has been an increasingly unmanageable sprawl and — depressingly — a reinforcement of the racially segregated urban geography of apartheid.

Rising land and construction costs are pushing low-income housing — and the poor blacks who live there — to the city’s fringes. State subsidies have not kept pace with the city’s property boom.

“Government has not been able to come to terms with the level of funding required,” says Taffy Adler, CE of the Johannesburg Housing Company, the non-profit community development group behind Brickfields.

The public transport system is also strained. Poor people pay disproportionately to get from distant homes to jobs: 46% of households in the city spend more than 10% of disposable income on public transport.

Unmotivated or unskilled local planners may be partly to blame. Few South Africans would describe Amos Masondo, Johannesburg’s second-term mayor, as a visionary. In keeping with ANC practice he was reappointed after this year’s local election and did not have to campaign directly against a competitor.

In spite of leftist rhetoric promising “a better life for all”, the ANC has taken a largely laissez-faire attitude toward urban development. While subsidised low-income housing is desperately needed in the inner city, private developers have been given virtually free rein to convert former office blocks into luxury flats. Middle-class housing developments are sprawling north of the city with little evident planning.

Apart from the Brickfields neighbourhood, city officials have shown little interest in drawing up blueprints to improve depressed areas such as Hillbrow.

“The city doesn’t have an urban design framework and it desperately needs one,” says Neil Fraser, who runs Urban Inc, a planning and development consultancy.

Prompted partly by the responsibilities of hosting the 2010 Fifa World Cup in four years’ time, local officials are beginning to respond. The Gautrain, a European-style rapid rail link now under construction, will ease the city’s transport problems.

Gauteng premier Mbhazima Shilowa is due later this month to launch a “global city region” scheme joining it and neighbouring municipal areas including Tshwane (Pretoria) and Ekurhuleni (the East Rand).

The project aims to boost the region’s ability to compete with the world’s other “supercities” and draw in investment.

Even life in benighted Hillbrow is improving, albeit from a low base. The quarter’s formerly run-down Europa Hotel has been transformed into decent low-income flats. In the surest sign that the neighbourhood’s fortunes may be turning, private-sector property developers are beginning to move in.

As run-down as they are, Hillbrow’s high-rise flats boast panoramic views and an attribute in growing demand in Johannesburg: location.