Guest: Nthabiseng Dubazana - Attorney at Dubazana Attorneys 

According to a report in the Sunday Times, the city has identified 188 hijacked buildings in the city center. The Johannesburg Property Owners and Managers Association has compiled a list of 57 properties that have been hijacked, where residents are charged between R600 and R1,200 a week by their “landlords”.
While the city and private property owners often want to send in authorities to raid buildings and evict people living there illegally, legal precedent states that they must provide adequate alternative accommodation to residents who would be rendered homeless by eviction.

However, there is a lack of low-cost housing in Johannesburg and the municipality is often unable to provide adequate alternative accommodation, which has led to city officials criticising the NGOs that defend tenants’ rights.

City of Johannesburg manager Floyd Brink told the Sunday Times that the municipality would go to court to test the law on alternative accommodation, claiming that it was required to house evicted persons within 5-10km of the site they had been evicted from.
“In a built-up area like this, where do you start?” Brink told the publication.

“We have tried several options to solve the problem of the hijacked buildings, but we always get stuck in legislation.
“We are considering our options and it looks like we will be approaching the courts in the coming week on an urgent basis so we can get clarity on what we can and cannot do about these hijacked buildings.

“People must understand the context. We have seen statistics that an average of more than 3,000 people relocate to Joburg’s inner city from other parts of the country and continent per month. I can tell you that we suspect that number to be lower than what we see in reality.”

In 2020, the Socio-Economic Rights Institute (Seri), one of the organisations often criticized by city officials, released a policy brief suggesting municipalities be both “predictive of potential homelessness and responsive to eviction orders that lead to homelessness.

“As it stands, alternative accommodation in Johannesburg is supplied haphazardly in relation to evictions in the inner city and in informal settlements, indicating an absence to plan. In both situations, residents are generally relocated into buildings or shacks that are poorly structured,” Seri said.

Addressing the media at the site of the fire on Thursday, President Cyril Ramaphosa said the incident needed to be investigated and lessons had to be learnt so that such tragedies could be prevented.
“It’s a wake-up call for us to begin to address the situation of housing in the inner city,” he said.