Complex communities

Edit: note that the Sectional Title Ammendment Bill is open for comment until 9 April 2021 if you’d like to have your say

More and more South Africans live inside complexes.

And with densification, we are more and more “on top of each other”.

I’ve seen — and laughed along with — Parody accounts of life in these complex’s on TikTok. More seriously, a friend has said “I’ll see you in court!” to his body corporate who are trying to prevent him from having his aged life-long domestic worker live with him and his wife.

This morning there are people on Twitter upset about neighbours asking them to keep kids quiet — asking for more compassion when struggling with fussy kids.

Outside of a complex — in a “traditional” neighbourhood setting, we create various types of neighbourhood associations for the purpose of community development, activism, and indeed to negotiate tensions within our neighborhoods. In these negotiations, we are governed by relevant by-laws and use street committees, ward committees, community action networks, rate payers associations, etc.

(We also tend to have more soft spaces that absorb sound — some gardens, established trees, ideally a park, etc — compared to the very hard-surfaced complexes that are commonly built today with a view of maximizing units built and minimizing monthly levies.)

Within the complex setting, there is the added layer of “body corporate rules”, and often dedicated security applying those rules, and a body of people to whom complaints can be made — who can in turn issue notices, put pressure on owners and tenants to comply, and — if rules are written well enough — issue fines.

Many South Africans cannot afford to be homeowners. There are more and more complexes developed where a majority of residents are tenants.

In this case, the rules are set and applied by owners, who are not residents.

In complexes where most residents are tenants, their ability to input into the rules, and negotiate and navigate tensions as a “community” is taken away.

The owners’ and appointed management agents’ interest is a) ability to attract and retain a tenant — keeping the complex looking attractive and reputable, b) annualised cost-efficiency — keeping levies low and c) protecting property values (often with quite narrow ideas of what will achieve all of these outcomes).

I own a flat in a complex where most of the units are rented and many of the tenants have children. The units are small, and there are no communal play areas. The complex was certainly not designed with lockdown living in mind.

Naturally, during lockdown children took to playing in the parking area. Heck, even some adults did (braais etc).

This caused issues to be raised — children of different ages playing together with some social issues; some destruction of property; complaints about the lack of supervision of children; concerns about safety etc.

While suggestions for a communal play area, after-school programmes other ideas where proposed, the owner and agent-led process (rather than tenant and thus “community” led process) to respond to these issues became a highly security driven approach — stronger rules on access to ensure kids from neighbouring complexes weren’t visiting, issuing fines for unsupervised children, taking photos of “offences” and distributing these, etc.

In South Africa, tenants are not allowed to attend body corporate meetings unless they have a proxy from the owner of the unit they are renting. So, individual tenants could attend, but there is no provision for any collective voice of tenants.

Tenants associations in South Africa tend also to focus on the rights of tenants in relation to their landlord — for example, to prevent unlawful eviction.

One solution to this structural barrier to complex community, is to set up complex-level tenants or residents associations, and work together to create community in the common areas, programme “neighbourhood” like after-school activities together, and input formally into the body corporate processes via a series of proxy’s or written proposals.

Perhaps more substantively, we need to look at tenant representatives on body corporates as a matter of the law?

This is not to say that navigating these issues and indeed tensions is easy — my favourite definition of “community” is this one from Contradictionary:

“Community: The sum of all the individuals and relationships in a social milieu — that is to say, none of them in particular; therefore, the abstraction for which any of them may be sacrificed”

That is, of course, that the “tenants” are not some uniform whole. They will have different ideas based in their different values, working hours, ages, cultures, etc — and goodness knows South Africa is “rich in diversity”.

This is not easy work. But leaving the rule making of finding what will commonly work for all, to some abstracted class of owners, ain’t it.