Cape Town - An eleventh-hour notice to oppose the City’s High Court application for evictions at various “tent city sites” in the Cape Town CBD has upset the City’s plans to carry out a planned operation to start serving eviction notices to homeless people.
Johannesburg-based NGO Socio-Economic Rights Institute of South Africa (Seri)’s court application meant that the evictions which were meant to begin yesterday (Wednesday) have been postponed to at least early October.
In February the Western Cape High Court granted the City’s application for eviction notices to be served at various unlawful occupations in the CBD
The City had been hoping to serve the notices after a court hearing yesterday at which they had expected to be granted a final eviction order, but Seri’s application put a stop to those plans and the hearing has now been put off until early October.
Yesterday, Mayor Geordin Hill Lewis said the City was very disappointed at the “extremely late notice to oppose filed by Seri”.
Hill Lewis said: “With the court roll so full, a late filing such as this not only wastes state resources, but causes severe delays in the hearing of the matter. In the City’s view, the net effect of this will be to keep people on the streets much longer through the Cape winter.”
Hill-Lewis said the City was open to “constructive engagement” on its well-publicised plan to increase dignified transitional shelter and help more people off the streets, with court assistance where necessary.
In February, the court ordered the serving of eviction notices at unlawful occupation hotspots along Buitengracht Street, FW De Klerk Boulevard, Foregate Square, Taxi Rank and Foreshore, Helen Suzman Boulevard, Strand Street, Foreshore/N1, Virginia Avenue and Mill Street Bridge in the city.
Meanwhile, the City said its Social Development officials had made repeated offers of social assistance to those unlawfully occupying public spaces in the city, including offers of dignified transitional shelter at NGO-run night shelters and City-run Safe Spaces.
Ndifuna Ukwazi attorney Daniellé Louw said that “homelessness should not be viewed as a problem with individuals, but as a problem of poverty”.
Louw said the City wanted to “shovel people into shelters” and that this was “just putting a tiny plaster on a gaping wound that is the housing crisis in Cape Town”.
mwangi.githahu@inl.co.za