admin
Property Reporter
INTEGRATED Properties founder and managing consultant Mike Eric Juru is the new Real Estate Institute of Zimbabwe (REIZ) president.
REIZ superintends over the training on professional in Real Estate (Estate Agents and Valuations) and the maintenance of professional standards.
Mr Juru, who has been a member of the institute for the past 22 years, assumed his new role at the Institute’s Winter School and AGM that was held in Nyanga early this month.
He takes over from Siza Masuka an Associate Partner at Knight Frank.
Mr Juru said that one of his priorities was to ensure that there is good corporate governance within the institute.
“Corporate governance tend to deal with a lot of things and that is it is important to implement it,” he said.
Mr Juru is the current vice president of Zimbabwe National Chamber of Commerce, chairperson of Zimtrade Export Development Committee and council member for Valuers’ Council and Marondera University of Agriculture.
He is a past winner of several awards which include, IOD’s Director of the Year.
Mr Juru is expected to oversee the implementation of strategies designed to address the challenges in the sector that were approved during the winter school and AGM.
The institute came into being at a meeting of the Auctioneers and the Estate Agents in Bulawayo on December 5, 1944 where the two agree to form an Institute embracing all the members of the two associations.
This was followed by an inaugural meeting of the Southern Rhodesia Institute of Estate Agents and Valuers on February 12, 1945 where the first members were elected.
How to solve the Global South’s urban housing crisisneeded, although the report makes clear that legislation alone cannot achieve the necessary change.
What works best, the report argues, are comprehensive approaches that encompass infrastructure upgrades along with better access to education and health services to address the complex and varied needs of residents of informal settlements.
In short, just offering a dwelling unit is not enough.
Case studies
The report cites two telling examples of comprehensive approaches: the Favela Bairro programme in Rio de Janeiro, and the Kampung Improvement Programme in the Indonesian cities of Jakarta and Surabaya.
The Rio programme is a good example of a slum upgrade that provided residents the right to use the land without a full process of land-tenure legalisation.
In addition to that legal breakthrough, the report says, “it also included complementary improvements in education, healthcare, job access, and safety policies, all of which increased residents’ security of tenure”.
In a call with journalists, the authors of the report and urban experts offered their thoughts on the problems of affordable housing and possible solutions.
They said the solutions lie in improving housing in existing informal settlements or what is referred to as “in situ” upgrading, instead of forcibly evicting residents and relocating them to the urban periphery.
Second, rental markets have to be expanded for people across all income levels by promoting and incentivising rental housing, and creating legal systems to protect both landlords and renters.
Third, under-utilised land in cities needs to be converted into affordable housing; cities may need to revise rules and building standards to expand the availability of total housing stock.
Needless to say, none of these approaches are politically or economically easy.
But the report strikes an optimistic note when it says, “If mayors, city officials, real estate developers and civil society leaders put their collective energy into three solutions highlighted in the paper, this will deliver livable, productive and environmentally sustainable cities for all.”
The report doesn’t only talk about what city leaders can do for slum dwellers.
It also discusses what slum dwellers are doing on their own. A good example is an alliance of organizations known as Shack/Slum Dwellers International, or SDI.
Since the early 1980s, these groups have been organizing residents to map their communities, document gaps in municipal services and advocate for improvements.
Through peer-to-peer exchanges, women-led groups of slum dwellers have been spreading the practice throughout the Global South.
Many of these ideas are not new; some smack of common sense.
But policy makers have not always been persuaded even by the obvious.
As Sheela Patel, founding director of the Mumbai-based Society for the Promotion of Area Resource Centres and chair of SDI, put it: “The smartest thing that cities can do is to sort out the basics. But instead of focusing on the fundamentals, governments sometimes concentrate on making business districts more effective. This only widens the cleavage between the ‘elite city’ and the ‘informal city’.” – Citiscope.
On May 5, 1947, a constitution, rules and byelaws for the institute were adopted, under which the Institute has pursued its objectives.
Later the institute initiated action which resulted in the Estate Agents Act.
Online Reporter