Durban - Shelters for the homeless mushrooming across Durban are to be regulated by the municipality because of fears they are being driven by greed and forcing the most needy to live in squalor.
To enable targeted and effective action, the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) has been asked to undertake a comprehensive study on homelessness in the city.
eThekwini Municipality’s Safer Cities senior manager
, Nomusa Shembe, said the more than a dozen shelters that had popped up were only about collecting money.
“Shelters are being commercialised. They only allow people to come at night to sleep and they chase them out in the morning. Some of these shelters don’t even have showers and living conditions are bad.
“They have lost the human element and are exploiting the vulnerable,” she said.
Shembe said the municipality was drawing up guidelines and would meet shelter owners in coming weeks.
“The purpose of the guidelines is to inform the shelters of the standards we expect and how they should be run. It should not be because the homeless are desperate that they will be given a low standard and still be expected to pay for it.
“We need to bring a human rights ethos into the operation of shelters,” she said.
Durban’s homeless population pays between R35 and R60 a night for a bed. While some shelters offer a meal and a hot shower, many only offer a mattress. Some shelters can accommodate up to 200 people for a night – that could earn owners up to R200 000 a month, before expenses.
Observers believe it is these shelters that fuel rampant begging at traffic intersections where beggars desperately try to make the fee for the night.
However, a manager at a city shelter, who did not want to be named, said shelters made a profit, but if it were not for them, thousands would sleep on the streets.
“We collect mattress fees because we have our overheads and need to keep the facility open. If we do not run these shelters, where would all these people go? The government and city are not doing anything for them. We are at least providing them with a roof over their heads at night,” he said.
Soswana Thomas, director of The Nest, a shelter for the homeless in the Point area, agreed that some shelters were just about profit.
“When I first started with the shelter, there were hardly any shelters in Durban. I have since stopped counting how many are popping up.
“Some of the people who open up shelters don’t do it for the right reasons. The conditions are not good for people. They are filthy. People are allowed to smoke and drink and it becomes a haven for criminals,” he said.
Shembe admitted that the city had no shelter of its own for Durban’s homeless but had identified a site in Illovo with plans to build one.
She said the city was concerned by the plight of the homeless and, in an effort to find ways to deal with them, was working with the HSRC.
“We are working with the Denis Hurley Centre and have formed a homeless forum where we have asked that a database of homeless people be compiled. We are also streamlining the work offered to homeless people to come up with a comprehensive plan to deal with the issues facing them,” she said.
Musa Gumede, deputy city manager and head of safety and security at the municipality, said shelters were “double-edged swords”.
“Unless there are free shelters, I don’t know where people would go. They need a safe place to go to.”
Gumede said the city had recently come up with a social development strategy to deal with homelessness.
He said they estimated there were 2 500 homeless people and 500 street children roaming the streets.
The city spent R2 million over three years on two organisations that cared for street children. There were no programmes in place for the homeless.
However, Gumede said, they were developing memorandums of understanding with NGOs to create “reception areas” for the homeless.
“The difficulty is that this issue is bedevilled by other social ills. When you deal with the homeless, you are going to find drug dealers, people who are on drugs, people begging with children, and prostitutes.
“This strategy is mainly around honest people and children who are destitute. But we need to deal with these other issues too.
“The reality we have is that we only have three rehabilitation facilities in KZN, and only one in eThekwini. When we were dealing with Whoonga Park we found that, to get 12 people into a rehab programme, took six months (to get space). The big thing is how do we deal with those who are abusing substances, be it alcohol or drugs?” he asked.
Daily News