As a New Year’s resolution, I said that this year I was going to do my best to not just criticise the City of Cape Town – and especially the DA – based purely on the many horrific experiences I’d had as a homeless man living on the streets of Cape Town for six years, most of all the hell that was Strandfontein.
I think I have kept my word. I have criticised when I have seen, heard or experienced things that have not been conducive to us all moving forward in helping the homeless move off the streets into sustainable and dignified accommodation, but I have also praised where praise was due.
A meeting I attended with Mayco member for social development Patricia van der Ross and her staff on Friday last week confirmed for me that this young, vibrant, enthusiastic, energetic and caring politician has every intention of doing what she can to utilise her time and office to bring about positive change.
She is well informed, has good intentions and good instincts.
Unfortunately, as I often try to explain to the public, there is no magic wand you can wave that will suddenly make more than 30 years of a failed system and its consequences disappear.
But I hope we are moving to a point where not only the public but also the departments of social development at municipal, provincial and national level will realise that a shelter is an emergency form of accommodation and is, in itself, a form of homelessness.
It is, by virtue of its nature and services, not meant to be a long-term accommodation solution for the homeless, but because it’s the only solution that has been offered to accommodate the homeless for forever, people have come to expect a great deal more from shelters than they should, and therein lies the problem.
Even I sometimes go off at the shelter operators in frustration that the shelters themselves have tried to take on roles and responsibilities that are not theirs to take on.
In so doing, they continue to prevent us from moving forwards and towards a ladder of homeless accommodation that will include transitional and supportive housing options for the homeless, where the necessary services can then be offered and where the length of stay is conducive to impacting positively on the effectiveness of those services.
We cannot just keep calling for more shelter beds. Shelters and safe spaces have a definite role to play, but cannot operate as the answer to addressing chronic homelessness.
Most of those who refuse to go to shelters have been through the shelter system already and know it has limited scope and nothing new to offer them.
These are chronic homeless people who will benefit nothing from going through it all again, just to land up back on the streets in a few months’ time as per shelter mandates.
Once an individual living on the street enters the shelter system or safe spaces they should never have to return to the streets. But they obviously cannot stay there indefinitely, that’s not what shelters are for.
And so our biggest need is that funds and properties start being made available and channelled towards the longer term accommodation options.
That is what Our House and Rainbow House in Observatory were.
But without the government’s funding, without financial support from big business and the general public, they will fail.
Even if the residents of these supportive and transitional accommodation models are expected to make contributions towards the costs, as they should do, and move from supportive to transitional accommodation, they will still never be sustainable. And they will suffer the same fate that Our House and Rainbow House suffered, because it’s not only high rentals you are contending with.
These forms of accommodation are where specialised services have to be offered, and where individuals are expected to get on their feet and rediscover how they can rejoin society as contributing members.
Some organisations, such as the Rehoming Collective with Our House and Rainbow House, implied the residents’ contributions were meant to cover all these costs. But then again, they also believed staff were not a requirement, and should you require them they should not be paid.
I have brought this up because it is important that people clearly see that with Our House and Rainbow House, it’s not the accommodation model that has failed the system, but the system that has failed the model.
And this is the type of situation that can lead to uninformed people making the wrong assumptions and assuming the model is at fault.
No, the fault here lies with the organisation.
So, let’s all work together to develop a homeless ladder of accommodation that will enjoy the funding benefits it requires to be successful, and which will be limited almost exclusively to supporting shelters.
This to avoid situations developing where organisations doing good work end up becoming irrelevant non-entities due to desperate measures being taken to avoid potential personal liabilities – as happened in the case of the Rehoming Collective.
The cost of such losses, for the homeless and the sector as a whole, is too great for us not to realise how important a properly funded homeless accommodation ladder is for us all (the City, the public, the service providers and, most importantly, the homeless) to get the outcome we desire.
That is, to have the right systems in place that will eradicate chronic homelessness and limit the time spent on the street by those becoming homeless for the first time by having the right systems in place.
* Carlos Mesquita and a handful of others formed HAC (the Homeless Action Committee) that lobbies for the rights of the homeless. He also manages Our House in Oranjezicht, which is powered by the Community Chest. He can be reached at [email protected].
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
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