Hijacked buildings are a common, unwelcome sight in the inner-city of Johannesburg and are homes to scores of vagrants and in some cases, illegal immigrants.

Interventions by law enforcement and the City’s immigration officials in order to redress the plight of those who occupy abandoned buildings in the city have been met with sheer hostility, with vagrants often drawing battle lines in order to defend, what is for them, their home. The derelict Cape York House on the corner of Jeppe and Goud streets in Johannesburg is one of many examples.

This utter devastation has, however, not gone entirely unnoticed.

A previously hijacked building named Chung Hau Mansions has now been returned to its former glory. The company responsible for its restoration and subsequent use as student accommodation began rejuvenating the building in November 2015 and moved in its first set of new occupants in November last year.

Ziyaad Seedat, marketing and operations manager for City Waldorf, a company specialising in student accommodation, gave City Buzz an account of the harrowing ordeal endured to transform Chung Hau Mansions into student accommodation, which, according to Seedat, continues the upward trajectory of returning a sense of law and order back into the inner city.

Read: Cape York – a hijacked building where anything illegal is possible 

“When we got to Chung Hau Mansions, we realised that these were not normal people,” Seedat stated.

“We found they were taking drugs and doing prostitution and dealing in all kinds of crime on a day-to-day basis. It bred drug dealers and you’d see young men arriving, covering their nice shoes with plastic and accessing the building to buy their fix.”

The 14-storey building, which Seedat said, housed in excess of 400 ‘wild people’ comprised avenues of homes and, just as with Cape York – shops. He also provided an account of a police raid prior to which City Waldorf attempted to create a register of the building’s occupants. A total of 90 per cent of them were found to be Tanzanian.

“We planned a raid after meeting with the police, the City of Joburg and the immigration office. The raid was put off several times to eliminate the possibility of a tip-off and when it did happen, it was by surprise. The police played it out very well.

“The raid was a full-on one and translated into scores being removed from the building.” The horror, however, according to Seedat, was that the vagrants had resorted to applying faeces to their bodies to prevent police and security [officers] from touching them.

“But after hours of gruelling fighting, them hurling rocks and police retaliating using rubber bullets, they were thrown out, only to return with a court interdict.”

Seedat said that although The Socio-Economic Rights Institute of South Africa, a non-profit organisation which aims to develop and implement strategies to challenge inequality, backed the vagrants.

City Waldorf – having had two previous court orders overturned in 13 years – applied to the National Department of Health to have the building declared unhealthy. “In the end, we crossed the finish line and managed to relocate 35 people to a home in Turffontein.

“Sadly, Cape York will see a similar problem arise.”

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