Please note that all building and renovation requires approved plans. For structures over 60 years, plans approvals in Parkview require three steps to be taken, for reasons of heritage protection: the JPC/PRA’s comment  needs to be received, then PHRAG’s, and then the plans can be submitted to the City for final approval. See the PRA website http://www.parkview.org.za/index.php?q=content/heritage for more detail.

In recent months the PRA subcommittee dealing with these matters has noticed more building and renovation going ahead without the required approvals. A related problem is faced when residents who did not follow the approval process, now wish to sell their houses, and face the banks’ requirement of approved plans for buyers’ finance approval. This sometimes means that the building or renovation which those owners previously did without the requisite approved plans, now has to go through the 3 approval steps. This can be an unpleasant process for the PRA to undergo – we often experience the friction caused by aggressive consultants advising either anxious or dismissive owners, and the PRA being put under pressure to stamp ‘No objection’ for buildings or renovations, after the fact, which would not have qualified for heritage approval if the correct process had been followed, up front. This is time consuming and unpleasant for our subcommittee members, all of whom donate their time to do this work. It also amounts to the PRA being asked to condone what is essentially unlawful activity on the part of certain residents. We have also been accused of being selective in our approach. As it is not the PRA’s role to police adherence to the local and provincial regulations and bylaws, we have asked the COJ’s new and diligent building inspector for our area to conduct more frequent checks of building sites in Parkview to assist in remedying the situation.