Joburg looks to snatch Killarney’s green spaces

In a move to snatch more of Joburg’s green spaces, the Joburg Property Company (JPC) wants to terminate its lease with the Killarney Country Club (KCC) to squeeze more cash out of the prime land.

This comes after public pressure forced the JPC  – which has been accused of badly mismanaging its properties – to backtrack on a plan to reclaim and sell part of Emmarentia Dam, the Melville Koppies and Marks Park to make extra cash.

Now it has set its sights on Killarney, a wealthy suburb north of the city. The KCC and the JPC have clashed in court over this dispute, with the property company arguing it had the right to terminate the lease it gave to KCC over two “breaches” of its contract. 

Darryn Faulds, president of the KCC, tells Currency that these breaches related to the club opening a restaurant and setting up an advertising billboard to supplement its meagre income. Fauld says the club was happy to rectify these breaches.

By last week both had officially been resolved – but this has not deterred the JPC from ending the lease, and trying to reclaim the land.

Residents say that the Killarney green space is well-maintained. That’s in contrast to other JPC properties; many buildings in the inner city have been hijacked, while an inquiry found the JPC’s own negligence was to blame for the Usindiso fire in 2023 that killed 77 people.

Civil society group the Organisation Undoing Tax Abuse has since gone to court to have former JPC CEO Helen Botes declared a “delinquent director” for her stewardship of the entity. Botes, it emerged this week, has been removed from all city roles.

Yet residents still have an opportunity to object through a public participation process, which is already under way in the city’s council.

JPC general manager Sizeka Tshabalala tells Currency that her organisation will “request permission to lease the property through a public tender or a division” after the public participation process finishes.

It is this public participation that sparked an outcry in July over the JPC’s attempt to seize parts of Emmarentia. Though the JPC withdrew this proposal, Eleanor Huggett – the councillor for Killarney, Houghton and Orange Grove – is convinced the entity will try again later.

Huggett says neither the KCC or the city council take issue with the public participation process itself – “the problem is we’ve just got no trust in the JPC. They do not have a good track record with being transparent.”

This lack of faith is not unfounded. The city’s finances are a mess, with R24.4bn splurged in “unauthorised, irregular, fruitless and wasteful expenditure” last year, and it is behind in R221bn on maintenance and upgrades for roads, power and water.

Rather than cut costs, its officials have turned to its property arm to raise cash. Killarney, which pays a pitiful annual rent of R2 per year, is an obvious start.

“Maybe the R2 does need to be relooked at, but all these leases were just token leases so that these clubs could maintain these properties at no cost to the city at all, for the people of Joburg to enjoy,” Huggett says.

The club is happy to pay a higher fee, Faulds says, and it wants to renegotiate with the city anyway. “We would like to get onto a different lease that isn’t so outdated, and also gives us longer terms,” he says.

“We worked quite hard on a detailed proposal to try and generate some more income for the JPC, because that’s obviously one of the things they wanted from a new lease.”

The club’s proposal included developing two specific areas of the golf course for residential use. It even suggested developers, drew-up architectural sketches, and put together an economic plan.

Yet Faulds says the JPC was strangely lukewarm about this idea. He says the entity has been vague about what it is looking for.

But the JPC’s Tshabalala says the property is worth R50m, so the city has “been losing quite a lot of money” over this lease.

This implies the city will look to sell it either outright, or in part.

“The only way [the JPC] are going to make money is if they sell it to developers,” Huggett says. “These spaces should be for the people to use and to enjoy.”

‘Wrack and ruin’

The bigger issue is that the JPC’s focus seems to be on seizing workable property, and ignoring the parts of its portfolio that are a disaster.

As Huggett puts it: “Why aren’t the JPC spending money on all their properties that they have left to go to wrack and ruin?”

There are numerous examples, which cast a damning spotlight both on the JPC’s competence, but also its aversion to transparency.

Five minutes’ drive away from the Killarney Country Club is a JPC-owned heritage house, Bleloch House. A 1930s Cape Dutch-style house, it sits on the intersection of Houghton Drive and Louis Botha.

Bleloch House was once the South African Police Service reservist training college, but at some point in the past three years it shut down. The JPC refused to answer questions about what the building is currently being used for.

When Currency visited, the property appeared to be occupied by someone, despite its heavily barbed exterior. But the house has clearly been neglected and left to rot, despite its prime location in a pricey suburb along a major road.

A short drive away, the old Norwood library is also owned by the JPC, and sits unused, its gates chained. The City of Joburg’s own index lists the property value as R2.68m, despite its decaying state. The JPC refused to answer questions about the building.

Huggett says the JPC is hopeless when it comes to putting the old library to use, despite how sought after it is. “Social services are desperate to use it; Lifeline is desperate to use it; even [the police] are desperate to use it – they need a safe place for abused women and children to go.”

In nearby Orange Grove, she says there are almost 40 houses currently owned by the JPC that have been hijacked, with little obvious action to reclaim that land.

Yet rather than fix its existing portfolio to ensure those properties become profitable, the JPC seems intent on splurging taxpayer money on taking the KCC to court to get its hands on yet more land. Sadly, this seems entirely in character for a city which wasted R24.4bn on fruitless spending last year.

_{Top image: The shuttered Norwood library. All pictures: Ruby Delahunt.}