Cape Town’s homeless face tough times

Cape Town - A prudent step to remove street people from a risky environment, or an undertaking that would simply make their lives more difficult.

These are some of the responses in reaction to Thursday’s article on the city’s construction of a field of vertical rocks under the unfinished elevated freeway, which forced the street people who had been living there to move.

Head of the Haven Night Shelter Welfare Organisation Hassan Khan agreed people had to move, saying the area was dangerous.

“That particular area has fast-flowing traffic. No pedestrians should be there, as people are likely to be victims of an accident,” he said.

The organisation runs nine homeless shelters in Cape Town and six more in other Western Cape towns.

“My priority is to encourage people to get off the street,” said Khan, adding “a homeless person is disconnected from family, has lost contact with friends and lost a sense of connectedness with society”.

Khan said the longer people lived on the street, the harder it became for them to reintegrate into society, so measures that encouraged them to get off the street should be praised.

But urban development analyst and Cape Times columnist Rory Williams said the city should be looking at ways to make life easier for the homeless, rather than more difficult.

“Using rocks embedded in concrete is a creative way to stop people from using a space without putting up fences, but a really meaningful innovation would be to find a way to attract the homeless to safer locations. People complain about how the freeway creates a wasteland, yet when a group of people figure out a way to occupy that space, we chase them away,” said Williams.

“We should be learning how to use this space more effectively rather than arguing about knocking down the freeway.”

According to mayco member for transport Brett Herron, the city has built two preventative rock fields.

The area under the footbridge across Nelson Mandela Boulevard near the “Boulevard” office block also has rocks in concrete to prevent street people from sleeping there. Herron has previously said the city had no policy to make it difficult for street people to sleep under bridges, but fires made against the bridge’s concrete could weaken it.

Mayco member for safety and security JP Smith said on Tuesday the city had received “hundreds” of complaints that the area had become dangerous for pedestrians and cars due to the conduct of the group living under the bridge.

Asked for comment, Priscilla Urquhart, the media manager for Cape Town World Design Capital 2014, said they were not involved in the project.

The city said street people could phone 0800 872 201 for assistance.

* Our article on Thursday, “Struggling between a road and a hard place”, quoted a homeless resident identified as Tyrone as saying he and others had been moved from underneath the unfinished freeway by the Central City Improvement District (CCID). The CCID has pointed out that the area does not fall under its jurisdiction.

- Cape Times