The City’s recent declaration of a 16% decrease in the number of homeless people sleeping rough in the City was shocking as it is not the reality experienced by U-turn or any of U-turn’s NGO partners across the City.
U-turn keeps extensive records on numbers of homeless people it sees yearly. These numbers have not decreased; in fact the number of individuals accessing our services has increased by 38% since 2015. Our work-based rehabilitation and skills training programme is constantly oversubscribed.
Similarly, complaints to the City about homelessness have risen by 53% between 2017 and last year. The increase in homelessness is visible and it is clearly becoming a bigger problem, not a smaller one.
Even if one suspends disbelief and accepts the numbers released by the City, digging deeper reveals a 17% decrease in homeless people accessing shelters.
The numbers indicate that the current response to homelessness does not support and enable people to access shelters as there are at least 3999 people sleeping on the street every night.
This represents a humanitarian crisis, and is not cause for applause.
The methodology for the City’s latest headcount is flawed and the release of these erroneous results, without consulting the stakeholders who assisted with the headcount, is damaging to the sector’s collective response to homelessness.
U-turn calls on the City to publish a correction to the statement that there has been a 16% decrease in the number of homeless people in Cape Town - whereas in fact 16% fewer homeless people were counted. The two head counts are different - apples cannot be compared to oranges.
The City must stop playing games with misleading numbers.
If the City were to focus its energy and resources on rehabilitative solutions and provide desperately needed pathways off the street the benefits would be felt by all.