C'est La Vie

There is bound to be some attempt at making some aspect of Homelessness illegal, but I'm waiting for the outcry at the informal settlement exploding between the Castle and Cape Town Station - the doings and extreme doings of the Housing Insecure spilling over Strand Street and obscuring the workings of traffic flow and pedestrian movement. It is impossible not to navigate this area without a sense of alarm at worst, concern and discomfort at best. Makeshift shelters seem to breed more of the same, and more and more new, desperate faces becoming familiar as their arrival becomes settling. The more morally compromised, and those displaying mental health dysfunction are left to impose and impinge on their immediate environment and its inhabitants. The sprawl of desperate, chaotic living is left to impact in such a way that there is not one positive comment to make about the human flotsam and jetsum washed up on the shores of civilized Cape Town, apparently with little the City Of Cape Town can do about it, because of some misplaced obsession of activists and NGO's with doing something effective and impactful about life for Housing Insecure people. Here is left to exacerbate that which motivates The City's urgency to 'get the homeless off the street'. While the climate lacks the despairing cold and miserable wet that increases the mortality rate amongst Homeless People, none of the energy displayed by Law Enforcement during those times to break down shelters and 'persuade' people into the legal justice system, is visible even as restraint, monitoring or management during this time of 'growth and re-settling' amongst the Housing Insecure. There seems no evidence of anything being done about 'getting people off the streets' and into the facilities The City tells us is able to accommodate this. Like the rest of us, The City apparently can also only watch helplessly as this crisis in humane existence unfolds. Though unlike us, The City should find the energy and resources to do something about it during winter. By then, it won't matter too much what that response is. By then the rest of us, be reasonable, don't care. Like when people were removed from the railway line between Woodstock and Salt River a couple of weeks ago. Who cares what happened to them? The trains have to run. (Ask not how people manage to construct shelters over railway-lines) Anyway, when The City is doing its worst during winter (part of persuading them off the street is making sure they don't get 'comfortable' on the street) try remember they did nothing now.

PS The last time someone raised alarm about people 'building' on the islands on Nelson Mandela Boulevard, those people were forcibly removed and their shacks thrown down. Some are dead now, some wonder around here

PPS The 'occupiers' opposite CPUT are being sent from pillar to post and have long ago run out of resources BTW Having no empathy for Homeless People says more about you than it does about them

NB The system is accountable