Cape Town - Gangsterism is the biggest culprit forcing people from areas surrounding Bellville and Parow, to end up on the streets of Bellville's CBD.
This is according to Voortrekker Road Corridor Improvement District (VRCID) Social Development Officer, Wilma Piek.
“People leave the gang-infested environments they come from and end up on the streets, but the sad thing is that when they get on the street they don’t know anything else and get involved in gangsterism once again.”
Piek said a census carried out by the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) showed a number of similar trends in homelessness in Bellville’s CBD as in other parts of the country.
The census was conducted by the HSRC in partnership with, and funded by, the eThekwini municipality’s Safer Cities Unit in February.
The census formed part of a research being done by the council in Durban - it should be completed later this year.
More than 80 percent of the homeless people surveyed in Durban said they were homeless because they came to look for jobs but then had to live on the streets.
“We see that a lot here (in Cape Town) as well, especially among the younger people and another similar trend is that we also have a large number of working homeless people,” Piek said.
“Homeless working people are those that have jobs but earn like R120 a day and paying transport to go home would cost too much, so they stay on the street during the week and go home on weekends.”
She added that psychiatric patients were everywhere on Bellville's streets.
Post-doctoral fellow for the human and social development unit at the council, Candice Groenewald said they were pushing for the research.
However, creating policy about homeless people would only work if homeless people were involved in the process.
“Policies can work well, if they are evidence-based.
“We believe in evidence based policy development, and that is why we are doing this research.”
She added they had feedback sessions regularly as the research progressed in a hope to be “as transparent as possible” to all the stakeholders involved.
The census found that close to 2 000 people lived on the streets in Durban's CBD, while 1 974 lived in formal shelters.
A wide range of stakeholders were involved in the research, and included street living people, business, metro police, representatives from local government, and NGOs.
Cape Argus