According to the Johannesburg News Agency, under the new dispensation, the department will approve 60 percent of building applications within 24 hours and up to 70 percent of applications within 28 days. In addition, the City intends to approve applications for rezoning and for establishing townships within six months.

“Property development has been hampered by slow rezoning and township development approvals, to the detriment of the whole industry. This has contributed to the shortage of suitable property stock for the Property Unit Trusts, so any improvement is to be welcomed,” noted Craig Hallowes, spokesperson for APUT. “We have had instances of township development approvals or rezonings taking up to many years to go through.”

Johannesburg is aiming to streamline the process for property developers with the opening of its new Metro Link Centre in September. A single, integrated town planning scheme is envisaged for Joburg, to replace the old segmented one.

“The purpose of the consolidated scheme was to find an equitable way of introducing a uniform land use management mechanism in the city,” explains Tiaan Ehlers, the director of Development Management in the department of urban management. This will help to eliminate administrative confusion and complexity.

Barry Stuhler, MD of Capital Property Fund supports the move, saying: “One town planning scheme would be excellent, as it would overcome some of the problems which arose with the creation of the Greater Johannesburg

Metropolitan Area. For example, the definition of “bulk” is not consistent between Sandton and other Joburg regions.”

While cautiously optimistic, Stuhler says that “As property owners, in addition to this zoning “help desk”, we would encourage the City to develop a fast, functional customer centric facility for

*Opening and closing of municipal accounts
*Sorting out queries on accounts and getting the reimbursements
*Speedy and coherent response to requests for repairs to services, roads (potholes, etc), traffic lights as these all affect our tenants
*Obtaining existing building plans – often it is easy, equally often it is impossible due to poor records.”

“I am most encouraged by this initiative, but we will have to wait and see how it works out,” comments Stuhler. “Capacity may turn out to be a constraint in this area too. We are aware that the department has staff shortages creating some of the bottlenecks.”

Hallowes adds that he would encourage other metropolitan areas to adopt a similar approach to urban development