How does does the national government determine the number of people living on the streets?
The national minister says: “We determine this based on the number of homeless people who access the services offered by our funded partners and service providers as reported to us on their funded programme reports”.
Hence, the minister in 2022, responding to a question in the national assembly, quoted the Western Cape as having 2 308 people living in shelters (the total funded beds) and 764 adults and 41 children living on its streets.
Those, ladies and gentlemen, are her unchallenged figures for the Western Cape! Not only Cape Town.
Those of us living in Cape Town know these figures to be ridiculous! But those are the figures on which our provincial budget for services offered to those living on the streets is based, so it’s no wonder that instead of reducing the number of people living on the streets, we are seeing them increase.
Add to this the fact that Covid-19’s impact on the economy and people retaining jobs wasn’t exactly a positive one and even more people lost the roof over their heads and you have what we see on the streets of Cape Town.
If we can’t get the national government or provincial government to change this rot, we have to at least do what we can in our own City.
The City has, by virtue of Grant in Aid interventions and their development of safe spaces with ratepayers’ money, mandated themselves to supply services to those living on the streets and they deserve praise for having realised the need to step in.
The City has eventually also started to react with more than just denials to demands and numerous costly lawsuits, calling for changes in how we as a city accommodate the homeless, although thus far, this has only happened in announcements made by the mayor and not much has happened in practice.
But already, we see the same danger signs on how the City will repeat the failings of the national and provincial government. They are again allowing themselves to be led by what their “trusted and experienced service providers” say and report to them.
This cost them dearly when they decided to go with those same advisers when it came to housing the homeless during Covid-19 and we all know how that ended: Strandfontein!
The City needs those living on the streets and those with lived experience of this as the primary advisers on their needs, not service providers, whose own survival depends on funding and thus do and say what they must to maintain the status quo.
So, how are we going to address this? How do we find out what we have actually never known?
We go back to basics and do a proper and detailed homeless census and do assessments with those whom we count at the same time.
We need those living on the streets to provide data on the how and why for their coming to live on the streets, their journey/experience on the streets and their needs/expectations to leave the streets.
Only with this data in hand, can the City have an idea of the extent of their mandate, the budget required to service it, and what services need to be offered, the priority of these services and who best to offer them.
These figures can then also be shared with the provincial and national ministries so they too realise why it is that we are in the predicament we are in.
Because no one ever bothered about going out onto the streets and finding out what the real situation is. And the attempts made were limited to complaints received from the affluent areas. They merely accepted that everything was under control and that night shelters were good enough to address those living on the streets, and just kept on pouring more money into temporary and emergency accommodation and convincing the public that these shelters were in effect reintegrating and reuniting those living on the streets, as per the reports they kept receiving from registered service providers.
Yet nothing could be further from the truth. Those that were prepared to stay in shelters did so and kept being moved from one to the other every 3-6 months so the service providers could be seen to comply with the provincial norms and standards for shelters.
Those that got fed up with this never-ending circle of abuse that went nowhere, returned to the streets and because of the level of criminalisation on the streets by law enforcement agencies, which, until Strandfontein, had been kept under wraps, most used to hide themselves away, coming out only on days such as bin days to skarrel for their survival.
The mountains, rivers, the cliffs, the large drains – these were all heavily populated by those living on the streets. To the general public that saw them only on bin days, they came in from other areas. But, NO! the reality is they were always your neighbours.
Lockdown saw hungry individuals previously “hidden” come out.
The City and its service providers have always chosen to ignore that most shack dwellers in less affluent areas and backyard dwellers on the outskirts of the city and in locations are also homeless.
* Carlos Mesquita.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
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