More than 70 people died overnight when a fire raged at a five-storey apartment building in Johannesburg that may have been rented illegally and is known as a ‘hijacked building’.
What are hijacked buildings and when did the problem start?
Since the end of apartheid in 1994, the housing crisis in South Africa’s largest city, Johannesburg, in Gauteng province, has worsened as major businesses have moved from the inner city to affluent suburbs.
Criminal syndicates started “hijacking” vacant buildings and illegally renting them out in the 1990s and 2000s. Soon they became derelict centers of drug crime and other lawlessness.
In some cases, the syndicates occupy buildings with fraudulent title deeds, said Angela Rivers, managing director of the Johannesburg Property Owners and Managers Association.
The people who lived there were convinced of the criminals’ property and either paid rent or were evicted, Rivers said.
How big is the housing problem?
At least 1.2 million people in the province are homeless, a provincial official said Thursday. Rivers said she was aware of 57 known hijacked buildings in the Central Business District alone, most of which are owned by the city or county government.
Experts say such buildings are susceptible to hijacking because they are poorly managed and lack access to amenities such as running water and electricity.
The burned building belonged to the city of Johannesburg on Thursday, Mayor Kabelo Gwamanda told reporters. The city had leased it to a charity, but it had “ultimately served a different purpose,” he said without giving details.
Many run-down downtown buildings are occupied by people earning less than R3,500 ($190) a month and account for more than half of the area’s residents, said Edward Molopi, senior communications and advocacy advocate for the Socio-Economic Rights Institute.
They are looking for housing that is closer to employment opportunities, and the municipal government must respond to their housing needs, he said.
Many also do not have the proper documentation to reside in formal housing and working in informal jobs means they cannot obtain any form of official identity papers.
What has been done to address the problem?
Lebogang Isaac Maile, head of the Human Settlements Department for Gauteng province, said 23 hijacked buildings had been identified in Johannesburg that needed development. About 100 buildings had no clear owners.
“There are cartels that target vulnerable people. Because some of these buildings, if not most of them, are actually owned by those cartels that collect the rent from the people,” he told reporters.
He did not go into how the authorities wanted to solve the problem.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published through a syndicated feed.)