“Your call is being attended to, please stay on the line.”
While these weren’t the exact words used to describe the City of Cape Town’s ongoing plan to tackle homelessness in the southern suburbs, this is what it boils down to.
The Wynberg Civic Centre was packed on Tuesday 25 October for a public safety meeting with Patricia van der Ross, the City’s Mayco member for community services and health; JP Smith, the City’s Mayco member for safety and security and Reagan Allen, the Western Cape Minister of Community Safety and Police Oversight.
Up first was Van der Ross, who gave a breakdown of the hurdles the City was facing in their efforts to evict street people from public open spaces.
In July, Smith shared that the City’s Safety and Security Directorate had drafted just less than 600 eviction applications “for identified invaded sites and tented camps which we have handed to Legal Services”.
With these eviction applications now having been filed, further action will be reliant on the speed, and the findings, of the court system.
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In the meantime, Van der Ross says they are busy gathering evidence that alternative accommodation and help were offered to people living at identified hotspots; and refused. She says these interaction engagements began in March.
“When we speak to the residents who are on the street for interaction, number one, they will tell you, ‘No, we don’t want your help, leave me alone’. But in the next interaction, when they are not high, they say, ‘Yes, please, I need your help’. But then in round three – because you need to do at least four interactions – it is a ‘no’ again. So the interaction is a ‘yes, no, yes, no’ interaction,” says Van der Ross.
Van der Ross says they have found that people have different reasons for living on the street.
“Mostly, some people are just not accepted at home anymore. Then we’ve got the foreign national street people and we’ve got the person that makes that choice to be on the street – the person that says, ‘I don’t care, nobody’s going to tell me what to do. I’m just gonna do my own thing’. Then we’ve got that person where life just happened. Where they (for example due to Covid-19) cannot afford a household anymore. They cannot afford a roof. So they, unfortunately, have to end up on the street.”
When asked why they were on the streets, Van der Ross says, some said it is because they didn’t have a choice.
“ ‘My mother doesn’t want me, my father doesn’t want me. What do I do?’ ”
Another is addiction.
“ ‘I get it cheaper on the street,’ they say. ‘I don’t have to look for it where I am. It comes to me, where I want it. I don’t have to pay R50 for a packet. They cut it down to R5 packets for me.’ ”
Most, Van der Ross says, simply just don’t see a reason to leave the streets.
“I met a lady in Muizenberg who said to me that she’s been on the street for 38 years and why must she go into a shelter now? She gets her toiletries on time. She gets clothing whenever people pack out their houses.
“She even gets food parcels. She gets all she needs, she even gets new bedding during winter.”
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For the past 11 months, the City has been running an initiative to raise awareness around the plight of people living on the street.
The initiative, called “Give Dignity” emphasises the importance of giving those in need a hand up rather than a handout. Instead of giving cash or food to street people, residents are encouraged to make a donation to shelters that offer street people a pathway out of homelessness.
Van der Ross, who often participates in these intervention engagements, says sometimes she feels it is rather the good-meaning residents who they need to speak to.
“I found that in most of my engagements, it is the residents who enable the street people. They make it comfortable for the street people to be on the street. And tomorrow, when it’s bin day, we all complain about the mess made at our bins. But next week, when there’s something that is perishable, we actually tie it up into a bag,” she says, adding that residents should rather donate it to a nearby shelter.
Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis also touched on the subject of homelessness recently, but this time at a stakeholder engagement held at the Claremont Civic Centre on Wednesday 2 November.
He says he hopes to see progress in the months ahead “with the cooperation of the court system”.
“We don’t want these cases to be mired in the court system for months and months and months. We want them to move relatively speedily through the system. And then we can, at last, see progress.”
However, Hill-Lewis cautions that when that time does come, it will be controversial.
“It will be the biggest instance of the City saying, here is everything that we have done. Please open the doors come and see what we have done. Come and give us ideas for how we can do it even better.
“But we must now get the eviction orders received and I hope that the residents who want to preserve public spaces for the public good, for public use, will at that time, speak up in support of the actions that the City is taking,” he says.
