To halt demolitions, City Hall must issue building permits openly

If you want evidence of Kenya’s strengthening connections to the global economy, look no further than its real estate industry.

The world’s interest in our property is documented in news stories about the entry of international developers, the monetary worth of building approvals and the securitisation of real estate.

Nairobi’s county government is helping to improve its attractiveness as a real estate destination by streamlining revenue collection and moving the submission of building plans exclusively online.

Despite this increased efficiency, the demolition of residential developments approved by the county has continued. Much of the blame is foisted on grabbers and cartels.

Column pages are full of advice from experts urging caveat emptor, that land buyers ensure they have all the proper documents, including exhaustive land searches and bills of quantities. Nobody, however, asks the most important question, which is why City Hall issues building permits for developments with unresolved shortcomings.

Just last week, the Daily Nation reported that State House Mombasa was the rightful owner of an abutting parcel of land on which a hotel was being constructed.

(READ: State House land to be repossessed)

It is not clear that Mombasa County, which approved the development, took steps to notify and seek comments from State House concerning the developer’s intentions as proper public consultation would have required. Consider, also, the three examples from Nairobi below.

In April 2013, the High Court ruled on a 2010 petition filed by a developer who went to court opposing the demolition of homes in Nairobi’s Runda Estate.

The development apparently encroached on a road reserve that was required for the construction of the Northern Bypass. The ruling by Justice Mumbi Ngugi held that the rightful road reserve was 80 metres and not 60 metres, and advised the petitioners that their proper recourse was to those who had sold the land to them.

Earlier this year, the Ministry of Agriculture began the destruction of homes in Nairobi’s South B after it claimed ownership of the land they stood on.

Nairobi Senator Mike Sonko intervened on behalf of distraught homeowners, memorably calling the President on his mobile to secure a stay of demolition.

It is clear that in both cases, homeowners would have been saved considerable expense, inconvenience and anguish had these ownership and encroachment disputes been settled before the start of construction, in consultation with the government departments responsible.

That obtaining a building permit did nothing to prevent these demolitions entitles us to wonder what a Nairobi building permit is actually worth.

VIOLENT CONFRONTATION IN WESTLANDS

In mid-July this year, there was a violent confrontation in Westlands between environmental activists and a group of armed men who have built a perimeter wall around a lush piece of land on Peponi Road.

We now know that, according to The Star, approval was granted by the County in April, allowing the PCEA Foundation to build luxury apartments and a botanical garden on the property.

The process by which this land was deemed to be not environmentally sensitive, even after the late Wangari Maathai campaigned to save it, has not been publicly documented.

Besides, it is not clear whether, if public land is now in private hands, taxpayers received market value for it.

In addition to approving development on unsuitable land, pressing questions persist over the approval of building designs that are obviously flawed despite the ease of learning from more successful jurisdictions.

Real estate for the affluent and globally-connected faces few of these problems, but lower-income residents of Nairobi struggle to live decently in homes with flaws that should be eliminated at the design and permit approval stages.

For a deeper understanding, you really should read Evelyne Wanjiku’s story on August 15, 2014 in which she writes about the constant damp that leads to unhealthy mould growing on ground-floor walls.

(READ: Most landlords are only concerned about the profits they can rake in)

In addition, high-rise buildings in Nairobi are routinely designed without chutes for garbage, making waste disposal without an elevator a laborious, dirty process.

Such shortcomings bode ill for a city in which limited land and a burgeoning, youthful, population mean that quality high-rise developments will become increasingly important.

PERMIT APPROVAL

Nairobi owes its fractious development in part to the lack of transparency around how building permits are approved. The county never has to justify publicly its decisions to grant or withhold a building permit, and the Urban Areas and Cities Act of 2011 does not compel counties to award building permits at public meetings.

The process favours developers while keeping the public uninformed about developments that change neighbourhoods irreversibly through increased noise, traffic and loss of green space.

The idea that Nairobi must surrender transparency in urban planning to be an international financial centre flies in the face of evidence from financial capitals such as Toronto, London, and New York.

In these world cities with property markets that dwarf our own, public participation in urban planning is entrenched in law and the demolition of approved buildings is virtually non-existent. A brief exploration may help to demonstrate why.

In Toronto, the Ontario Planning Act of 1990 and the Municipal Act of 2001 respectively require public meetings for planning matters. In the state of New York, the Open Meetings Law requires every meeting of a public body to be open to the general public. These laws also list certain matters that would necessitate a private meeting, such as pending litigation or personal matters about an identifiable individual.

In Britain, new rules enacted just last month allow the press and the public to report on council proceedings through modern technology such as filming, audio-recording, blogging and tweeting. According to the British government, the Openness of Local Government Regulations 2014 were passed “to end active resistance" amongst councils, some of which would call the police to arrest people who tried to report on public meetings.

The new rules build on the Public Bodies (Admission to Meetings) Act, which was successfully championed in 1960 by a backbencher named Margaret Thatcher.

PUBLIC DENIED INFORMATION

The websites of these local governments are full of information that is kept from the citizens of Nairobi. For example, the members of planning committees or commissions who vote to approve building permits are publicly identified. Meeting minutes and schedules, planning reports, and votes of all committee members are posted online.

In contrast, Nairobi City County’s online portal for construction management at ccn-ecp.or.ke is not linked to the main county website. Neither site carries any information on the dates of technical committee meetings, or lists which development applications have been approved, deferred, or denied.

Building approvals here are decided by a technical committee about which very little is known. The public cannot attend its meetings and the names of its members are not public.

It is not clear whether any of the committee members are private practitioners, with their own real estate, planning, architecture or engineering firms, and how conflict of interest during the approval process is avoided if so.

Cities in which frequent demolitions destroy people’s life savings, and which cannot issue impeccable building permits are unlikely to become global centres of real estate and finance.

To avoid the demolition of approved buildings, transparency and public decisions in the approval of building permits will be necessary in Nairobi. Nobody who obeys the law and obtains a valid building permit deserves to have their home destroyed.

Mr Ngéthe is Nation Media Group’s Syndication Editor.