One would hope that the on-going debate on land and property expropriation for the benefit of the disadvantaged will at some stage lead to a fair and equitable solution. However, a vital point which has only occasionally been raised thus far is ‘Should expropriation apply only to private property? Or is there a case for local and government authorities to participate in the process themselves, by giving up some of the property that the state owns?’
Bill Rawson, Chairman of the Rawson Property Group, recently drew attention to this point in discussion with certain of his staff who were anxious to know where the whole process might end.
“It is,” said Rawson, “common knowledge that the state and its provincial bodies, as well as municipal authorities, own vast tracts of land – so large that they do not, as yet, have a comprehensive list of all their properties. What is more, many of these buildings and vacant land are in strategic areas that would be suitable for immediate development or redevelopment – and much of this property brings in either very limited or no income at all.”
Among the more unfortunate legacies of South Africa’s former adherence to segregation, said Rawson, was that, in urban areas, low cost housing was often developed well away from the more affluent areas, for example at Khayelitsha in Cape Town and Soweto in Johannesburg.
Today, said Rawson, this means that the poor are often faced with high travel costs (in relation to their own earnings, to get to and from work – or to look for work for that matter). By way of contrast, most European and UK cities have almost always allowed the poorer members of their population to live within walking or inexpensive travel distance from the main work providers.
Asked for examples of this, Rawson mentioned that on most UK coalmines the miners lived within a kilometre of their pits. Similarly at the notorious cotton mills and the London Docks, employees usually lived even closer to their workplaces.
“Much of the state and parastatal land is sited far more conveniently in relation to work providers than the current informal settlements and would be ideal for low cost housing, with or without new industrial infrastructure,” said Rawson.
“A strong case, therefore, could be built up for the state becoming the first and possibly the major institution to hand over land. Presumably those deals, being in a sense in-house, would cost very little. This is often not the case when dealing with private property, where the owners have a tendency, as we have often discovered, to overvalue their assets to an unrealistic degree.”
