Alexandra's population grew steadily during the late 1920s and 1930s reaching 10 000 to 15 000 by 1936. Its character also continued to change, as subtenants came to comprise the bulk of the population and what were described as ‘slum conditions’ began to emerge. Despite the much heavier burden of managing and servicing the township, however, the Alexandra Health Committee's (AHC's) revenues and powers were barely increased. Combined with ethnic, racial and personal in-fighting in the Committee, this had by the mid-1930s, brought Alexandra to the brink of crisis. The existing mode of administering Alexandra was to nobody's liking, but no one seemed able to come up with a better alternative. On the one hand, many like H.S. Cooke, Director of Native Labour and Chief Native Commissioner of the Witwatersrand, believed that Alexandra's powers of self-government should be revoked. On the other hand, no other part of the local, provincial or central administration was prepared to take it over or to lend any support. Alexandra, as subsequent Health Committee chairman, Alfred Hoernlé, remarked, was ‘nobody's baby’. For a growing portion of white society the only solution was to wipe it off the map.

The Falwasser years of the 1930s, when H.G. Falwasser presided over the AHC, in particular represented a formative period in Alexandra's history, encompassing as they did the suppression of the electoral principle on the much treasured AHC along with escalating demands from all points of the white political compass for Alexandra's removal. As a result one part of Alexandra's later political ethos now crystallised. A cohesive and sustained land holder identity and consciousness now took shape and the ethnic rivalries of earlier years among the land-owning community was largely suppressed or dissolved. This new cohesion (as will be shown in Chapters Three and Four) was also reinforced by a growing tenant presence, which swamped and remodelled the previously ethnic geography of Alexandra as well as challenging the rights and authority of the land-owning elite. Between them these developments propelled sustained land owner opposition to the various initiatives of the Department of Native Affairs (DNA) and the Transvaal Province until the beginning of the Second World War.