This is the first part of a two-part column responding to the opening of a new Safe Space by Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis in Green Point:
We have close to 8 000 individuals living on the streets of the Cape Town CBD which increases daily.
According to the City, their 3 Safe Spaces have since their inception and at a cost of R8.5 million per Safe Space per year assisted, on average, 47 people to come off the streets, either through re-integration or reunification. This cannot by any stretch of the imagination be considered a success.
Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis officially opened the latest Safe Spaces in Greenpoint yesterday (Monday).
This will result in a great deal of good publicity for a City plagued by bad press over the last couple of weeks about their Safe Spaces intervention.
We will hear that it is proof of the City's commitment to increasing the number of bed spaces available to those living on the streets.
We will hear that two meals are provided daily,
We will hear that there is access to a social worker.
We will hear that there is access to the City's outpatient drug rehabilitation program, the Matrix Program.
We will hear that there are employment opportunities.
We will hear how it can change lives for the better.
But nothing will be said about these services that the City claims are available to those staying at the Safe Spaces, also being available to those living on the streets.
Nothing will be said about the disastrous 2.5% success rate of the current Safe Spaces over a 4-year period.
Nothing will be said about the indignity suffered by those unable to sleep, soaked to the bone on their makeshift pallet beds during a storm two weeks ago at one of the Safe Spaces.
Nothing will be said about the inability of residents to use the unserviced and blocked toilets.
Nothing will be said about sores all over the resident's bodies from all the lice and rats.
Nothing will be said about the notifications to evict people back onto the streets once their six months are up, Nothing will be said about rotating residents every six months.
Nothing will be said about people getting evicted on the eve of the implementation of a court order, to protect the City's lie under oath about having sufficient bed spaces available for all those they were seeking eviction orders against in court.
Nothing will be said about this intervention keeping people imprisoned on a never-ending merry-go-round of homelessness.
Nothing will be said about the fact that all the City’s interventions for the homeless are of a temporary nature, and serve only the needs of the City
Nothing will be said of how they afford the City the public relations opportunities like the one we will no doubt witness post Monday, to create the impression that an issue that impacts negatively on a great number of the City's residents is being addressed in a caring manner, and to further enhance the false narrative that those that remain on the streets are still there because they refuse the City's assistance because they don't want to follow rules - and so the City's Approval ratings soar.
Nothing will be said of how it benefits the City financially to staff vacancies in various departments by virtue of the cost effective and temporary nature of the jobs they offer Safe Space residents.
Nothing will be said about the fact that “while providing a ‘leg-up’, the temporary nature of the EPWP employment option offered at the Safe Spaces, often undermines the ability of rough people living on the streets to escape poverty traps, or amass skills in high demand from the labour market.
Nothing will be said about Safe Spaces being places where a select few people living on the streets can go and lay their heads down at night, and be told to leave before daybreak to spend 12 hours of their day back on the streets and then have to renegotiate for their bed for the night
Nothing will be said about Safe Spaces breaking up families as they cannot be housed together.
Nothing will be said about pets having to be put down because Safe Spaces do not allow pets.
We will hear that the “homeless are the cause of their own misfortune”, and thus should accept any offer that “takes them out of squalor and puts a roof over their heads.”
Nothing will however be said that now, more than ever, we need better housing developments for poor, homeless, and formerly homeless people, and not more safe spaces.
We need to rethink what homeless accommodation should be and what it should look like. We need to completely redesign housing for homeless people.
Unfortunately our DA Mayor seems intent on throwing the City's entire budget for improving the lives of those living on the streets, into an undignified intervention that perpetuates homelessness by keeping people enslaved in the system.
The Mayor and City would do well to look at what other international Cities have been doing successfully.
Cities that have rejected the same system the Mayor keeps defending, and replaced it with what is currently considered best practice.
(I will share that with you in my next column).
* Carlos Mesquita is an activist for the homeless and a researcher working in the Western Cape Legislature for the GOOD Party.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
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