Stacy has to shout to be heard over the sound of pounding house music and the cheering crowd here at this rooftop bar in South Africa’s latest hip neighborhood: Maboneng. The crowd is young and racially mixed and is buying liquor by the $100 bottle.
Stacy, who didn’t give her last name, is a management consultant for an international firm and says this downtown area has been built up quite nicely. But, she warned, “you walk a little too far and you’re in the slums.”
Half a mile away, James Khumalo lives in a 7-by-7-foot room with his wife, Zibuse, and 8-year-old daughter, Gugulethu. Calling it a room may give it too much credit; it’s a shack, built of a patchwork of wooden scraps. Most of the room is filled with a mattress, balanced on buckets that once held fry oil for a fish and chip shop. Labels from milk cartons cover the cracks and openings in the walls, to afford his wife and daughter some privacy and to make a futile attempt to ward off bedbugs and cockroaches.
“This is where we stay. Hard conditions,” he says.
Johannesburg’s inner city has seen dramatic change in the past 20 years. As apartheid began to collapse, laws that kept the black majority out of cities were first disregarded and then repealed. But as black people moved in, whites fled to suburbs. The inner city dramatically degraded, with neglected buildings, fewer services and rampant crime.
But now this image of downtown Johannesburg is beginning to shift, with the arrival of property developers who are creating affluent enclaves, such as Maboneng and Braamfontein. The developments have been hailed by the international press.
While the explosion of craft beer and organic vegetables has been welcomed by many, the human cost of these hipster enclaves has been less examined: increasing gentrification puts real pressure on the cost of living for Johannesburg’s poorest.
The Socio-Economic Rights Institute of South Africa advocates for tenants who are facing eviction in Johannesburg, usually because of new owners who want higher rents. The new landlords are buying buildings at auctions, and while they may not be charging exorbitant rents, it’s still too much for the poor, according to Kate Tissington, a senior researcher for the institute.
“For our clients, that’s a big problem,” she says.
Many of the buildings are former factories or office spaces, never intended to be residences. One report estimates there are 1,300 slum buildings housing 250,000 people in Johannesburg.
The Hercules, where Khumalo, his family and about 150 others live is one of these buildings where the people are fighting eviction.
Slideshow: Life in the squatters’ residences
