Cape Town gets eviction orders
After a drastic rise in street dwellers occupying pavements, vacant land and sleeping under bridges during the Covid-19 lockdowns, the City of Cape Town has successfully obtained eviction orders for those who refuse its offers of assistance.
The city won two orders last week for street dwellers who do not take up accommodation in what it calls Safe Spaces. It can now evict people living illegally on Victoria Road and Kloof Road in the tourist spot of Camps Bay and the 37 street dwellers in Culemborg in the CBD. This area is near car dealerships and arterial roads and contains highway bridges being damaged by fires, according to court papers.
In December, the city won an eviction order to remove 37 people living in tents next to the Green Point tennis courts.
It is hoping to win another permanent order soon to remove people in various main roads of the CBD near businesses and pavements, and tourist sites. The orders prevent new tent cities from being set up in the same spaces.
Court papers filed by the municipality say it faced “a colossal task with respect to the number of occupations of its road reserves, pavements, traffic islands and public places”.
To evict street dwellers, the City needs to show in court it has made repeated and extensive offers to support those living on the streets and provide alternative accommodation, which it has to invest in.
During the moratorium on evictions under the Disaster Management Act in the Covid-19 pandemic, 186 extra informal settlements sprang up across Cape Town, with 69,318 structures. The city has more than 800 informal settlements. In the court papers, it calculates there are more than 6,000 street people, primarily in Mitchells Plain, Belville and the CBD.
As the number of tent dwellers rose, the city received more than 30,000 complaints from 2019 to 2022. These covered defecation in public, drug paraphernalia, large quantities of litter and tents being an eyesore and a deterrent to tourists.
In the latest set of court papers, the city said it had to win an eviction order to remove the 37 street people from the Culemborg area or residents would do it themselves.
“There is mounting pressure, aggression and frustration between the street people and residents and business owners in the Culemborg area. The city has a real concern that unless the escalating situation is managed, it will have people taking the law into their own hands and engaging in vigilante action.
“The city and mayor have thus far managed concerns by assuring residents and business owners that it has a plan in place intended to give dignity to the street people.”
A tourism worker, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said street people are not necessarily committing crime, but tourists’ biggest fear about coming to SA is the lack of safety and security and tent cities make them feel unsafe.
For those evicted, Cape Town provides six months accommodation and help in its Safe Space shelters at a cost of R41,000 a person a year. The city describes the shelters as a dignified transitional place to live, where mental and physical health support is provided along with social workers, skills training and a short-term placement in public works programmes.
But some street dwellers do not want to move to Safe Spaces as they are locked out of the shelters during the day and cannot store many possessions. Most are single-sex dormitories.
Lawyer for activist group Ndifuna Ukwazi Jonty Cogger says “everyone agrees that homelessness is not ideal for the city, for tourism, for residents and for homeless people themselves. But you need to put in place a working, sustainable solution in order to get results.
“Tweak your Spaces to make sure that people actually want to go there so that you can resolve homelessness, and not just say that you want to resolve it.”
However, the city says its plan to expand the Safe Spaces from the present 700 beds at a cost of R200m over three years is working.
In the 12 months ending June 2023, it helped almost 3,500 people with shelter placement or referrals to an array of social services. This includes 2,246 shelter placements, 112 family reunifications and reintegrations, 1,124 referrals to social services, and more than 880 shortterm contractual jobs.