After becoming Cape Town’s youngest mayor in November 2021, Geordin Hill-Lewis said his biggest challenge was to solve homelessness, so he focused on fast-tracking social housing projects.
The issue of homelessness is a much-debated topic the world over. In Cape Town, the City Council has been criticised for its handling of homelessness and dragged to court for its treatment of people living on the streets., was allegedly shot dead by a City law enforcement officer.
“All of these other failures that come from different parts of the state and society end up in this person living on the street in a particular city. The City’s only real core task is one of law enforcement. In the past, the City has always dealt with this [homelessness] through the lens of law enforcement. The results speak for themselves. The issue is just burgeoning. The realisation that I had was that we had to stop passing the ball around.
“That’s how we see the safe-space expansion and the shelter-bed expansion that we are doing in the homelessness space. That is never going to be permanent housing.”One of the long-term solutions to homelessness is social housing. In May, the mayor announced in a council meeting that land in Newmarket Street in Woodstock and Pickwick Road in Salt River would be released for social housing. The release of this land should see“There’s a huge need in Cape Town for affordable, social housing.
“Get them into that pipeline and start working them through the process much quicker than the five years that it’s taken for this land. We are talking about one year to get from identification to release. That’s my mayoral priority project and hopefully that starts to, over time, ease the pressure for much-needed social housing in Cape Town.
“We are yet to see meaningful intervention in dealing with the crisis of homelessness. It’s a social development issue; you can’t deal with those things with policing. It needs a different approach,” added Booi.
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