Cape Town - Most of Cape Town’s homeless people can be found in the city centre, closely followed by Somerset West. And the main reasons for many of these people seeking shelter on the street were housing problems or family turmoil.
These are the findings of a June 2014 study by the City of Cape Town which included interviews with more than 2 000 people living in 52 suburbs across the city.
More than 2 508 homeless people, or people living in shelters, were interviewed, to provide some detail of why people take to the streets. In the report, researcher Lynn Hendricks, of the Department of Social Development and Early Childhood Development, noted that there was no official tally of the number of homeless people in South Africa, or on Cape Town streets.
“Based on these studies there is, however, no formal statistic on the number of street people in Cape Town. Neither does it inform us about the resilience street people have and how they find stability on the streets. These studies do not explore any additional skills training that street people have obtained through shelters. This is therefore possible avenues that are wished to be explored by the undergoing of this current study.”
The research, which forms part of the city’s goal of counting and setting up a database of homeless people to guide future interventions, involved getting field workers to visit participating shelters and to speak to people living on the streets. Not all of the city’s shelters took part in the study, which identified a homeless person as someone living and sleeping on the street or in a shelter.
More than 500 of the 2 508 participants who took part in the study were in the CBD and almost 40 percent of these lived on the street, and not in a shelter.
Of the 2 281 study participants, 47.4 percent said they slept on the streets while almost a third spent their nights in a nearby shelter. Ninety respondents said they slept under a bridge and 66 named the Company’s Garden as their preferred sleeping place.
The least popular places for homeless people surveyed were the beach, a parking lot or the police station.
More than 70 percent of the people living on the street said they were from the Western Cape, and of these almost half were born in Cape Town.
Most of the homeless people surveyed came from Mitchells Plain, Athlone, Kensington and Khayelitsha.
Men made up more than 1 000 of the homeless people interviewed, with only about 354 women identified.
Most of the study participants who lived on the streets or were based at assessment centres were between 26 and 35 years old. The numbers declined for the older age groups, with only 19 people older than 66 years identified on the street.
Most of the respondents living on the street were coloured.
Most of the black respondents lived on the street, rather than in shelters. Among white homeless people, the group was evenly split between those who lived on the street and those who used a shelter.
Most of the respondents said they had spent between a year and five years on the street, followed by about 100 who had been on the street for six months or less.
Many cited problems with adequate housing as their reason for being homeless. Just over 13 percent of the people living in shelters said they had left home because of family problems. Substance abuse also featured. Other reasons cited include gangsterism, being a foreigner and struggling to find work, having no family, unemployment and even ill health.
Most of the people spoken to said they would be interested in living in a community village, as an alternative to the street, but more than half of the people surveyed did not use the soup kitchens in their area.
The community village concept was introduced by the city last year, and involved moving people from the streets to facilities outside the city centre, such as in Philippi, where skills training and rehabilitation programmes would be available.
Almost 30 percent of the respondents said they survived by begging. Prostitution was not used as means of survival by many homeless people – only two people listing this as their main source of income.
Hendricks said the findings were limited to people who could be observed during the four-day study period.
Further studies will examine the reasons for living on the street by location, as well as profiling those who live on the streets and those who opted for shelters.
Cape Argus