Durban - A property expert tasked with rescuing some of the city’s “bad buildings” is taking the municipality to court challenging its housing policy and accusing it of abandoning the poor in neglected high-rise buildings which are fast turning into slums.
“Sectional title is not for the poor,” Andre Grundler said in his Durban High Court application. He is seeking to hold the city and human settlements department financially accountable for the “inevitable consequences of a poorly-executed housing programme” through which tenants in council housing bought their flats and were then forced to manage “elitist and unsustainable” sectional title schemes.
Although his application deals specifically with the situation at Flamingo Court in Umbilo, he refers to similar issues at Elwyn Court at the Point and other buildings, and says his warnings to officials that people will lose their homes, have fallen on deaf ears.
Grundler is an unlikely hero for those living in these buildings as he is the one bearing the bad news that if people cannot or will not pay for services and rates, they will be out on the streets.
The 13-storey, 200 unit building was part of the city’s traditional rental stock for needy people. In spite of highly subsidised rentals, some still struggled to pay.
In 2000, in terms of the national housing programme’s “discount benefit scheme” the building was converted to sectional title and tenants were able to buy their own units for between R600 and about R800.
Grundler says no financial assessment was done on their ability to pay the joint costs of sectional title ownership.
They were not told ownership would be substantially more expensive than their rentals - which some were already battling to pay - and that they could lose their homes as a result.
There was also no comprehensive costing done on long-term maintenance and repairs on the crumbling building which needed new downpipes, windows, lifts and repainting.
Grundler said the Sectional Title Act required the establishment of a body corporate which had to collect levies from owners and there was no provision for “debt relief” or cross subsidisation.
“If someone does not pay, the act provides that they be sued at their own cost and once the arrears are sufficient, their home may be declared executable and sold to recover their debt.”
He said sectional title was appropriate for people with regular income or sufficient capital to meet increasing costs.
Grundler said he had been appointed as an administrator in many buildings, “stepping into the shoes” of the body corporate because it could no longer manage itself.
The only way to sort out these buildings was to bring levy arrears up to date, take legal action against those who could not pay and put a realistic maintenance plan in place.
One of the steps he took after his appointment as administrator in 2010, was to negotiate with the city for the building’s common electricity supply account to be separated from the rates debt so that the lifts would work.
Also on the “crisis list” was the need to install separate water meters in each unit, which involved the re-plumbing of the entire block, because residents refused to take responsibility for a shared bill.
But the city refused to assist with funding and it regularly cut the supply in spite of undertakings to the contrary. This enraged residents, caused more friction between them and himself and meant he had to go to court to get it reinstated.
“In 1998, the people of Flamingo Court had access to sustainable state subsidised housing. The manner in which ownership was offered to tenants suggests at best, that the municipality gambled on the sustainability of the scheme and, at worst, was indifferent,” he said, asking for an order that the city rehabilitate the building, install the water meters, write off arrears and pay for the administration costs.
The provincial government and the eThekwini Municipality are opposing the application. Both said feasibility and income studies were done and tenants had been advised of the responsibilities of sectional title.
Visvanathan Moodley, a strategic manager in the municipality’s department of human settlements, denied that the city had shirked its responsibilities and, far from abandoning people in a ‘bad building’, had provided them with a habitable building in good repair.
Moodly said the water account arrears now stood at R4 million ‘and the city was not in a position to provide the residents with unlimited amounts of water not paid for’.
He said there was no obligation on the city to provide individual water meters because the ‘cost was prohibitive and would have increased the purchase price’.
‘Sectional title is the only mechanism available to facilitate ownership in such buildings. Other buildings in a similar situation to Flamingo Court have not descended to the same level of disunity and malfunctioning.
‘It would appear that one of the major factors is disunity among people living there,’ he said.
The Mercury