Clean streets need not be a privilege for only the wealthy

Illegal dumping has become one of the most visible failures of local government in Nelson Mandela Bay, and nowhere more so than in the Northern Areas. The municipality itself doesn’t dispute this. As one official put it: “That is a fight we can’t win on our own. We need the residents to work with us.”

It’s a candid admission, and also a convenient one. It shifts the debate away from municipal capacity and onto residents’ willingness to step in. So, the question worth asking isn’t whether the municipality has the resources to fix this, we already know it doesn’t. The question is what residents are actually being asked to do instead, and whether that’s fair.

One model gaining ground in the metro is the special rating area (SRA), known elsewhere as a community improvement district. The mechanics are simple: property owners in a defined area agree to pay an additional levy, on top of ordinary rates, to fund supplementary services such as cleaning, security and environmental management in their own neighbourhood.

Richmond Hill was the first to establish an SRA, focused on regeneration. Central followed, dealing with urban decline. Kini Bay has taken a stronger environmental-management angle. Summerstrand and Newton Park are in the pipeline.

On paper, this is participatory governance at its best: residents organise, set priorities, put money behind them and build capacity the municipality can’t provide. A recent opinion piece in Daily Maverick made this case forcefully for Johannesburg, pointing to a well-known inner-city improvement district as proof that the model works, and arguing that the City should finalise its own policy framework to allow more of them.

It’s not a bad argument, as far as it goes, managed precincts genuinely do look and function differently from their surroundings. But the author’s argument, like the model itself, assumes residents have money to organise around in the first place. That’s the assumption Nelson Mandela Bay’s experience should make us question.

The same problem, a very different ability to respond

Consider two neighbourhoods, both wrestling with illegal dumping, neglected public space and deteriorating infrastructure. In one, most residents are employed, property values are reasonably strong and there’s a commercial base to draw on. In the other, a large share of households depend on social grants, informal trading or irregular income, and the monthly budget is already fully committed to food, electricity and transport before anyone gets to rates.

Both neighbourhoods want the same outcome namely, a clean, safe, liveable place to live. But an SRA’s revenue is a direct function of property values and collection rates: more properties with higher values plus higher collection equals more money to spend.

A well-resourced suburb can use that formula to fund a cleaning crew and ongoing maintenance. A low-income area, with equal or greater need, generates a fraction of the same revenue. The paradox writes itself: the greater the need, the less able the community is to fund the fix.

This isn’t hypothetical. Where household income is already stretched and property ownership is complicated by inherited homes, informal arrangements and multiple families sharing a single title, even a modest additional levy is a non-starter.

Add the levy anyway, and you don’t get an SRA that struggles, you get one that never gets off the ground, because there was never enough money to hire anyone in the first place. That’s not a failure of community spirit. It’s a structural feature of the funding model.

There’s a second, quieter danger too: because SRA revenue is tied to property value, poorer areas risk a self-reinforcing decline, lower values mean less levy income, fewer services continued neglect, and further depressed values. Wealthier suburbs get the mirror-image virtuous cycle.

None of this is an argument against SRAs as a tool. It is an argument against assuming they’re a tool everyone can pick up.

Residents can’t simply wait for government, either

None of this lets us residents off the hook, and it shouldn’t. The municipality has said it cannot manage illegal dumping alone, and the rubbish and its daily impact aren’t waiting for the next budget cycle.

But there’s a real difference between residents acting because the government has failed and residents being expected to replace the government because it has failed. The first is agency. The second is policy abdication dressed up as empowerment.

That space in between doesn’t require a bank balance. It can start with a resident flagging a dumpsite that keeps returning or neighbours documenting a neglected corner of their suburb, evidence that identifies hot spots and makes neglect harder to wave away. But this is about more than evidence-gathering; it's about ownership. Every resident already owns a stake in their street, whether or not they hold title to a property on it.

When that street becomes a dumping ground, it sends a quiet message that the place someone calls home doesn’t matter enough to protect. No one should have to watch their own address become synonymous with rubble and black bags. You shouldn’t need capital to care about where you live or permission to insist your street stay a street.

By mapping dumping sites and organising targeted clean-ups, residents contribute time and local knowledge even where a levy is out of reach, and reclaim the right to define their own neighbourhood rather than have it defined by whatever gets dumped there first. The dividing line is simple: the municipality owns the service; the community owns the standard that resists becoming an excuse for the government to withdraw further its accountability from the ground up, that resists becoming a substitute for the state.

We can’t make affordability the price of dignity

Strip away the technical language, and the SRA debate is really about something more fundamental: whether the ability to improve the place you live becomes yet another benefit distributed by income. A wealthier suburb can organise itself and simply buy additional capacity. A poorer one can organise with equal enthusiasm and still lack the means to do the same. Telling those residents to pay more isn’t realistic. Telling them to wait indefinitely for the municipality isn’t acceptable either.

What’s needed instead is a blended approach, municipal investment where the market genuinely cannot deliver, targeted infrastructure funding and community-led documentation and action that doesn’t require wealth as an entry ticket. The government has obligations. Communities have agency. But communities do not have equal financial capacity, and any model that pretends otherwise will simply entrench the inequality it claims to be solving.

We won’t all have the same ability to pay. But we can all have a role in reclaiming the places we call home and that shouldn’t be a privilege reserved for those who can already afford it. DM

Dr Claire Botha is a health economist and policy analyst specialising in public sector policy, health financing, and resource allocation, with more than 15 years’ experience across the government, NGO, higher education and research sectors.