South African property owners and landlords have been sharply criticised for not investing in the properties, not maintaining them and not doing anything to improve the surrounding areas.
Ashraf Adam, chief operating officer of the Department of Public Works, said many of the buildings are in a shameful state that clearly shows how little is spent on maintaining them.
“Government is spending millions of rands on renting properties that are not properly maintained by the owners,” he told delegates at the opening of the Green Building Conference being held at Cape Town’s International Convention Centre (CTICC).
Adam, who took over as the chief operating officer just three weeks ago, says that on his first day in office he was handed a report that examined levels of corruption within the department, then the next day he had to deal with a public service strike and from then on it just went from bad to worse.
“I am here today to make all of you feel uncomfortable,” he said.
“We have an enormous amount to do and the green agenda is really important to us as government tackles and tries to resolve many of the thorny issues we face.
“Property companies have a predatory nature and they chase rentals but do little or nothing to keep the buildings in good shape,” he said, adding that often the buildings were actually allowed to decay even though government was paying millions in rentals every year.
He says that there needs to be much closer co-operation between the landlords and the government departments that rent the space adding that the responsibility of landlords does not end with maintaining the building, but should extend to ensure that the neighbourhood surrounding that building is also maintained.
He says that the environment – and the many green issues related to the building industry – remained high on the government’s agenda and that the regeneration of inner cities must be taken seriously by the property development industry.
“If you look at places such as Pretoria, the central city areas have been abandoned in favour of the leafy, comfortable office parks in the suburbs and this is clearly not what we need to see in South Africa,” he said.
“The reality is that the central city areas have the buses, the public transportation and the infrastructure to bring people into the city in the morning and carry them home in the evening,” he added.
“Pretoria is typical of many other centres around the country and we want to see much greater effort put into the regeneration of our central business districts that have been abandoned by so many property developers,” he added.
Adam contends that too many of the conferences in South Africa lead to little action and extended a direct invitation to delegates at the Green Building Conference to increase the dialogue with government representatives in a round-table discussion that was both frank and open.
Referring to building methods used by the building industry, Adam said that it was all too easy to consider green building methods in the new structures that are created around the country, but added this is just part of the problem. “The real issue is that there must be a regeneration process introduced to the building industry so that existing buildings can be made functional and environmentally friendly at the same time.
“Green building is much greater than just ensuring environmental compliance,” he says.
“Consider, for instance, that the raw materials used to create the buildings may rely on slave labour, may involve strip mining techniques or that the new buildings are far away from the public transportation routes.
“In fact, a major vehicle finance company has been guilty of such ‘greenwashing’ when it erected its new head office away from the city, away from the public transportation routes and forced many workers to rely on mini-bus taxis to get to and from the workplace.
“This makes a direct contribution to an increased carbon footprint for Johannesburg as a whole and while the new building might have many interesting environmental features, it cannot be considered a ‘green’ project,” he added.
“And the worrying factor is that, invariably, it’s the government that is left to pick up the tab when things start to degenerate and when buildings or suburbs fall into a state of disrepair,” he said.
He said that property developers have to adopt a more responsible attitude to maintaining their properties and not just turn around and increase rental rates without putting something back into the community as a whole by ensuring that the building and the precinct is kept in a serviceable state.
“It is up to the property developers to join in a partnership with government to rebuild our cities and we invite all the landlords to come to us with solutions to the challenge of urbanisation that faces us in the years ahead.
“Let’s convene a round-table discussion so that we can take these deliberations forward into action,” he added. – Paddy Hartdegen
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Interesting how these Government Officials are always saying Property Developers this and Property Developers that; who authorises the development in the first place – the very same Government/Municipal Officials. If they refused to sign off these developments in the “leafy suburbs” then they would never happen there; this way they could ensure development around the infrastructure. Does RSA still have qualified City Planners who could control this? - K Alexander
It is not only the “big” property owners that is at fault here, we are renting the same house since 2004 and the owner do absolutely nothing to improve or uphold the property.
When we moved in it was a 4 bedrooms, double garage with a servants quarters house, after the landlord converted the one garage to a granny flat for his son to live in it was reduced to a 3 bedroom house with a double carport. Then the rainy season started last year.. which reduced the house to a 2 bedroom house.
We can only use 2 bedrooms at this stage, one for us and one for our daughter. The one room became a storage room for the items that was usually stored in the garage, I am sure that we are the only household that store the lawnmower and wheat eater in their house. The cupboard that I am using have damp, my clothes smell of this every day.
The whole property have damp nearly up to my shoulder and I am 1.74m. everywhere the plastering is peeling off and grass grow out of walls of the house in the back.
The 3rd room sprung a leak and we have mushrooms growing in the one corner of the room, therefore we cannot use the room for anything other than the tumble drier.
If it start raining we first run for buckets to place in the passage and the one bedroom (which is not helping anyway) before we let the dogs and cats in.... it is leaking in the bathroom too. My curtains in this room are turning green already and they are actually blue.
We cannot afford to move as my husband is struggling to find a work and this we discussed with the landlord and every time his response is “show me” and that is where it stays.
Oh I must say just after we moved in, they came to paint the “window panes of the lounge and the dining room on the outside”
There is no proper driveway and we do bundu bashing everyday when we go out and when we arrive back home. – Just saying
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