Durban organisations that work directly with people living on the streets of the central business district believe that eThekwini Municipality needs to relook at its plan to build a 400-bed homeless shelter in Illovo in KwaZulu-Natal.
A report by the Security and Emergency Services Committee was presented at a council meeting more than a week ago, which confirmed that more than R13million would be reallocated for the construction of the 400-bed Sakhithemba Homeless Shelter.
More than 2300 Illovo residents have signed a petition against building the facility in the area.
Dr Raymond Perrier, director of the Denis Hurley Centre and former chair of the eThekwini Task Team on Homelessness during the Covid pandemic, said the plan to build a 400-bed homeless shelter in Illovo in its current form will not work.
He said for the past 10 years Safer Cities and the municipality had been talking about a farm in Illovo and giving people an opportunity to move out of the city.
Perrier said from the outset the problem with the shelter is that both the residents of the area and the homeless themselves have not been consulted.
“There might be some homeless people who want to go and live in the countryside and farm but the municipality is assuming that there are 400 who will go willingly,” he said.
Perrier questioned whether the City would force homeless people to go to the facility.
“You can’t arrest somebody and move them because they are poor... moving people against their will is exactly what happened in the era of apartheid,” he said.
A fundamental flaw with the facility, according to Perrier, is that it does not address why people are homeless in central Durban.
“They didn’t choose to be homeless. They came to the city to look for work, but they didn’t find work. That’s why they ended up on the streets,” he said, adding that unless there is work available, the City is not addressing the problem.
Perrier said according to their estimates there are about 6000 homeless people in the city and moving 400 in an attempt to clean up the CBD and boost tourism would not make a dent.
He said the City unsuccessfully tried to reunite the homeless with their families.
“They (the City) provided free transport to move homeless people back to the rural towns that they had come from.
“People signed up for that because it’s free transport ... and they stayed for a couple of weeks but within a couple of weeks, we saw them all back in the city centre,” said Perrier.
Lucky Ndlovu, co-ordinator for the organisation People Who Use Drugs in KZN, based at the Bellhaven Harm Reduction Centre in Durban, said he believes it is a good initiative, but the municipality is not providing any medication for people who are drug or opiate dependent.
“That is going to be an issue to house people and ensure people stay for the intended period,” he said.
Ndlovu said Illovo is south of Durban and removing people from the central hub, where they had come for economic opportunities, will be an issue.
“People will always find their way back to the city to try to make a living because this is about housing people and not really providing them with solutions to the economic issues they are dealing with,” he said.
The facility would work if it is more centrally situated, he said. “Removing people from a central location is a problem; it is not dealing with the situation.”
The Mercury