Transit camps no solution to city’s housing dilemma

BYLINE: OLIVER METH

SECTION: NEWS; Pg. 7

While the eThekwini municipality has set out to provide housing to all, there have been problems with development and delivery. Transit camps, which are meant to house informal shack-dwellers temporarily, are an innovative way of dealing with the problem. Yet they too reflect the many problems in terms of the process, and represent some of the challenges Durban is facing.

A report by Mark Misselhorn in 2008, stated that the city faced an informal settlement housing backlog of about 190 000 units but that this figure could be about 25 percent higher, based on the differential between estimates by the city’s housing department as well as the water and sanitation department.

The Mercury understands that about 400 000 houses are needed in eThekwini alone to meet the region’s needs; while the country’s national housing backlog is 2.1 million.

The Mercury visited the “Tin Town” settlement in Gwala Street, Lamontville, where more than 400 families have lived in tin structures since 2008. Because of the dilapidated conditions, some residents said they would rather be living in informal shacks than in the tin camp.

Lamontville is home to 38 817 residents and is one of the oldest townships in South Africa. A rough estimate of the number of people living in transit camps, given by councillors in the community, is 2 000 families.

University of KwaZulu-Natal researcher Kerry Chance said: “Transit camps, as they were known during apartheid, were used in the ’50s for the screening, segregation and repatriation of unwanted black urbanites; and in the ambiguous late apartheid years, progressive lawyers used transit camp legislation to prevent the removal of people to distant sites.”

Emergency

Coughlan Pather, eThekwini municipality housing head, said some transit camps were built as temporary spaces for emergency relief while houses were being built.

The tin houses are universally hated and widely disparaged as |”amatins” and “government shacks”. Across the country people have burnt them, marched, thrown up burning barricades and gone to court in their attempts to avoid being dumped in such places.

Academic Richard Pithouse said: “Despite resistance, thousands of people have been forced into these camps unlawfully at gunpoint or lawfully by judges who tend to hold to the assumption that they are automatically better than shack settlements”.

Chance said adequate accommodation could only be established through meaningful consultation with residents, which, as a starting point, takes seriously their claims to dignity in housing. However, Pather said residents were being consulted about developments and would be moved to available housing on completion of projects.

Mahendra Chetty, director of the Durban Legal Resource Centre, said: “The core component of a right to adequate accommodation must entail a standard of living consistent with fundamental rights such as privacy, dignity and security.

“It should entail the provision of clean drinking water, security in the sense that the house must have a door and windows, and the state must be under an obligation to ensure that the area in which people reside must be safe, or, at the very least, the state is under an obligation to ensure that steps are taken in this direction. The houses must also be properly built.”

Chance said it seemed as if all the major political parties saw transit camps as a useful way of expelling the urban poor from the cities and ending any political autonomy that they might have developed through self-organised occupations without having to pay to provide decent housing.

Area councillor Mokgadi Malatsi said the municipality was doing its best to house people. “What is better… a shelter over people’s head or nothing?” he asked.

The transit camps in Gwala Street are one-room boxes with tin roofs measuring 23mÂ2. Some are built in rows, with a single sheet of tin separating one family from another. The camps have no electricity. Some have outdoor communal taps, toilets in tin or plastic structures.

In the city’s defence Pather said the basics, like water and sanitation, were provided, but electricity could not be supplied to everyone because of the temporary nature of the accommodation.

However, residents said they faced an uncertain future, with many having lived in the transit camp for more than three years.

“You can imagine how hot it gets,” said Tin Town resident David Nene. “And the place is infested with insects. Some people have been moved – one group last year and another two months ago, but I still don’t know when I will move.”

Malatsi told The Mercury a transfer process had taken place.

“We have moved people to Kingsburgh West, where a housing project has just completed.”

She said 200 homes had been allocated at the project for Lamontville, and “more than 10 wards are moving to Kingsburgh”. A further 25 would be moved in weeks to come.

There are several other transit camp communities in Durban including Siyanda, Richmond Farm, eNsimbini, Ridge View (Transact Camp), Cato Manor and New Dunbar.