Johannesburg’s housing crisis: Squatting and squalor

In the heart of Johannesburg, 44 Nugget Street stands as a grim symbol of the city’s housing crisis. With 400,000 families waiting for homes, illegal occupants endure darkness, lack of water, and hazardous conditions. The surge in hijacked buildings, fuelling a thriving illicit business, has escalated following a fatal fire. Johannesburg grapples with spatial inequalities rooted in apartheid, leaving many to seek refuge in unsafe dwellings. As the city faces economic challenges and anti-immigrant sentiments, a comprehensive strategy is urged to tackle housing shortages and address the complex interplay of social, economic, and political factors.

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Housing Shortage in Africa’s Richest City Leaves Squatters Risking Their Lives for Shelter
By S’thembile Cele and Khuleko Siwele

Inside the damp, stained walls of 44 Nugget Street in Johannesburg’s inner city, residents have grown accustomed to navigating the constant darkness with mobile phone flashlights. The roughly 500 people who live here have also learned to go without running water and toilets.

“No one in their right mind would want to live like this, but what can you do when your budget forces you to?” says Mlungisi Mthimkulu, an unemployed 54-year-old who has lived in the the three-story building illegally since 2008. “We long for better places to live.”

Johannesburg is facing an unprecedented housing shortage, with 400,000 families on a waiting list that spans decades. The city’s inability to provide low-income housing has forced tens of thousands like Mthimkulu into the more than 600 so-called hijacked buildings that populate the city’s once-thriving downtown — everything from abandoned high rises to derelict office buildings and factories — living in slum-like conditions and paying rent and protection fees to criminal syndicates.

The precarious living conditions were thrust back into the spotlight when a fire broke out in one of them in August, leaving more than 70 people dead. Since then at least three more buildings have caught fire.

“We’re very concerned at the conditions,” said Charles Cilliers, a city housing official. The growth of illegal dwellings is fueled by the housing shortage, he added, “but I’d say the biggest factor in this is that there’s people making serious money out of turning the hijacking of buildings into very successful business.”

Housing is a national challenge for Africa’s most developed country — more than 3.4 million people are waiting for assistance. Gauteng province, home to Johannesburg, has the greatest need for housing but has perpetuated the legacy of the Apartheid government’s “spatial planning” policy where Black laborers were forced to live on the outskirts of the city. The majority of Black people are still forced to live far from jobs in the city — or opt for life in informal settlements or hijacked buildings.

Johannesburg’s once-thriving downtown today is a haphazard warren of informal housing constructed from zinc sheets and plastic tarps built alongside unofficial dumping sites. Many houses are subdivided and rented by the room to entire families who can’t afford proper housing.

Inside hijacked buildings like Nugget Street, residents put up makeshift doors made from old wooden pallets or cardboard boxes and zinc sheets, and are wired to illegal connections to the city’s power grid — the cause of many of the recent fires.

“Obviously if you are not paying for power you find another means to connect to the grid, and that is done recklessly,” says Banele Khumalo, a 22-year-old resident of another hijacked building. “On the days that there is no power, some leave candles burning and fires start. Those of us who are around break down doors to try put out those fires or stoves so that we can contain the damage.”

Civil society groups concede that some of the buildings should be deemed uninhabitable, but many argue that they are still safer than being out in Johannesburg’s streets at night.

“It is obvious that if they had an alternative, somewhere else to call home, you would not find them here,” says Siya Mahlangu, secretary general of the Inner City Federation, an advocacy group that works with building committees. “No one wants to live where they have got no electricity — it shows that there is no other avenue.”

The city, whose services have been declining for years, can’t access the buildings. Frequent raids by the authorities to evict residents or disconnect the power have been futile — evicted residents, with no other place to go, inevitably return. The city’s actions have in some instances been declared unlawful by the courts.

Read more: Johannesburg’s two-sided property crisis – Andrew Kenny

The arrival of thousands of migrants to the city each month makes the problem even trickier. In 2017, the housing backlog stood at around 300,000, but the city could only afford to build only 2,000 houses.

Many of those living in the buildings are migrants. Between 2016 and 2021 more than one million people immigrated to South Africa — largely from Zimbabwe and Mozambique — with around 47% settling in Gauteng. That influx has bred resentment in a country where unemployment is 32.9%, one of the highest globally, according to the International Monetary Fund.

Shrinking economic activity has also given rise to anti-immigrant parties that could threaten the ruling African National Congress party’s grip on power in elections this year.

The city doesn’t have a unified strategy to address the housing crisis, but Cilliers argued that the country must take a broad approach — addressing illegal immigration but also refurbishing hijacked buildings so they are livable and brought under the social housing umbrella.

Civil society groups have proposed converting properties owned by the city to low-income housing. “That can be done through outsourcing to a private managing agent because it is clear that the city can’t manage its stock,” says Simon Mayson, cofounder of the Makers Valley Partnership, an NGO in the inner city.

In the meantime, raids on hijacked buildings continue across the inner city, but there’s no planning for what to do with the evicted residents. Months after the fire that killed 77 people and brought hijacked buildings back into the headlines, the city moved its surviving residents to small tin shacks in an industrial park with no water or electricity.

Whatever plan the city ultimately devises to address the crisis, the mafias that run the hijacked buildings will likely still have a role to play.

In many cases, the city will need to arrest the gangs running buildings, said Cilliers. But it must also “find a way to make it economically feasible and attractive for people to start to offer up buildings in social housing projects — and maybe the mafias and the cartels can even clean up their act and go and register social housing initiatives.”