Entrepreneurs build dreams in places of nightmares

Enough of the bad news then. Gather round, everyone; Uncle Peter has some good news to impart for a change.

Once upon a time, a long, long time ago, I arrived in Johannesburg, wide-eyed and full of dreams about conquering the world.

Like many penniless young white arrivals from the provinces in those days, I settled in the cosmopolitan melting pot of Hillbrow. As I made my way in the world, I moved to Berea and then to Yeoville. Black people started arriving and, I thought, we all got along rather well, so well that we were proving we could muddle along well enough without the nannying of apartheid.

I was so optimistic about this exciting new South Africa that I bought a townhouse just next to Yeoville. Then I left the country. Seven years later I returned to a democratic South Africa to find that my old haunts had gone to hell in a handcart. Hillbrow, Berea and Yeoville were in a mess; overcrowded, infested with west-African drug dealers, dangerous criminals on every corner and decay all around. I started reading about buildings being "hijacked". So, I took fright and sold my townhouse.

Seven years after I bought it, after the fees and things, I cleared the amount I had bought the place for. I considered myself extremely lucky to get something out. A decade later I consider myself extremely foolish; while I fled to the suburbs, many inner-city property prices rocketed five-fold. In recent weeks I have spent considerable time stomping around my old stomping grounds: Hillbrow, Berea and other parts of the inner-city.

The other day I was in Primrose Terrace, which is dominated by the hulk of Highrise, the very big block of flats where I first lived in Johannesburg in the 1980s. Nowadays it's a high-rise dump, a squalid sectional title eyesore that would not look out of place in downtown Luanda. I averted my eyes from Highrise. I was, after all, in the street to see Francinah Likhama, who owns 30 of the 42 apartments in Yellowwood Park, a block dwarfed by its much bigger, rundown neighbour. Francinah told me about how she had been a security guard and the de facto caretaker of the building in which she had bought a one-bedroom apartment.

She told me about how the owners fled and the tenants turned Yellowwood Park into a tip, refusing to pay rent and utility bills. And how she bought flats one by one and worked to turn the building around. When the bad guys in the building realised what she was doing, they tried to set her and her flat on fire. But Francinah persisted. Today Yellowwood Park is a clean, respectable building with no drug dealers and no crime.

Even more remarkable is the story of Josephine Tshaboeng, a former domestic worker who owns an 83-room property on Saratoga Avenue that houses women students from the University of Johannesburg. Her property, Harmony Galz, is a home from home for young women who are in the Big Smoke to realise their dreams of a better life. Back in the day, though, Josephine's building had also been hijacked and, by the time she got the insurrectionist tenants out, they had completely trashed the place while she ran up a R1-million legal bill.

Like Francinah, Josephine is a hands-on entrepreneur who lives and breathes her business and pays her bond every month. Josephine is enjoying the fruits of her hard work (she has recently been on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land and happily rattled off the places she had been to: Jerusalem, Bethlehem, the River Jordan).

Later I met Augy da Costa, a white entrepreneur who has dropped millions into one building on Pretoria Street. In Hillbrow.

Today the old Elkam Building (Augy has renamed it "Hollywood Heights") is a state-of-the-art residential and retail property that tenants are queuing up to get into. Entrepreneurs are cleaning up places and creating viable, healthy living spaces for ordinary people who want to live close to the city in safe, respectable accommodation.

Their stories are small-scale entrepreneurial victories that don't make the headlines but, put them together and they represent a little-known but hugely important good news story. If only I'd hung on to my townhouse.