{"id":257841,"date":"2023-04-19T17:53:31","date_gmt":"2023-04-19T15:53:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.groundup.org.za\/article\/court-postpones-eviction-hearing-against-cape-town-homeless-occupiers-until-october\/"},"modified":"2023-04-19T17:53:31","modified_gmt":"2023-04-19T15:53:31","slug":"last-minute-delay-to-court-hearing-on-eviction-of-homeless-people-on-cape-towns-streets","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/last-minute-delay-to-court-hearing-on-eviction-of-homeless-people-on-cape-towns-streets\/","title":{"rendered":"Last-minute delay to court hearing on eviction of homeless people on Cape Town\u2019s streets"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"article_body\">\n<p><a class=\"bigger-image\" href=\"https:\/\/www.groundup.org.za\/media\/uploads\/images\/photographers\/matthew_hirsch\/good_hope_castle.jpeg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img decoding=\"async\" alt src=\"http:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/04\/last-minute-delay-to-court-hearing-on-eviction-of-homeless-people-on-cape-towns-streets.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p class=\"caption\">A group of homeless people, represented by the Socio-Economic Rights Institute of South Africa (SERI), have managed to delay an application by the City of Cape Town to have them evicted from several public sites in the city centre. Archive photo: Matthew Hirsch<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The City of Cape Town\u2019s application to evict people living on several sites in the city centre has been delayed by several months.<\/li>\n<li>The matter was to have been heard in court on Wednesday.<\/li>\n<li>But at the last minute the Socio-Economic Rights Institute of South Africa (SERI), representing the group of about 120 homeless people, filed an intention to oppose the eviction.<\/li>\n<li>The court has given the homeless people until June to file answering affidavits.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>A group of homeless people, represented by the Socio-Economic Rights Institute of South Africa (SERI), have delayed the hearing of an application by the City of Cape Town to have them evicted from several public sites.<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" alt class=\"leave\" height=\"1\" id=\"gu_counter\" src=\"http:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/04\/last-minute-delay-to-court-hearing-on-eviction-of-homeless-people-on-cape-towns-streets.gif\" width=\"1\"><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.groundup.org.za\/article\/cape-town-to-serve-eviction-notices-on-people-living-on-public-spaces\/\">In February,<\/a> the court granted the City\u2019s application for eviction notices to be served at \u201cvarious unlawful occupations in the Central Business District\u201d. These sites in the city centre include Buitengracht Street, FW De Klerk Boulevard, Foregate Square, the Taxi Rank and Foreshore, Helen Suzman Boulevard, Strand Street, Foreshore\/ N1, Virginia Avenue and Mill Street Bridge.<\/p>\n<p>The application for the final eviction was to be heard in the Western Cape High Court on Wednesday. But the hearing has now been pushed back several months after SERI filed its notice of intention to oppose the eviction this week.<\/p>\n<p>Cape Town Mayor, Geordin Hill-Lewis, in a statement on Wednesday said it was unfortunate that the City\u2019s plan to increase \u201cdignified transitional shelter and help more people off the streets\u201d would now be delayed\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe City remains of the view that no person has the right to reserve a public space as exclusively theirs, while indefinitely refusing all offers of shelter and social assistance.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cOur city\u2019s public places serve important social and community purposes and must be open and available for all. Illegal occupations of City open spaces impact the safety of traffic and pedestrians, as well as local businesses critical to growing the economy. Accepting social assistance to get off the streets is the best choice for dignity, health, and well-being,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<p>Hill-Lewis said that \u201ca late filing such as this not only wastes state resources but causes severe delays in the matter. In the City\u2019s view, the net effect of this will be to keep people on the streets much longer through the Cape winter\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>In the statement, he said Social Development officials had made repeated offers of social assistance to people occupying public spaces in the city centre, including transitional shelter at night shelters run by civic organisations and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.groundup.org.za\/article\/city-expands-safe-spaces-as-it-pursues-evictions-from-public-spaces\/\">City-run Safe Spaces.<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Khululiwe Bhengu, an attorney at SERI, is representing the group of about 120 homeless people. She told GroundUp that SERI had been approached by the people living at the seven sites to oppose the eviction. \u201cRight now, it might seem to many that they are homeless. But they\u2019ve got shelter at the seven sites. It may not be brick and mortar, but those are their homes.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>She said that the group had <a href=\"https:\/\/www.groundup.org.za\/article\/we-need-more-safe-spaces-for-homeless-people-in-communities-say-npos\/\">highlighted a number of issues<\/a> with the safe spaces, such as the opening and closing hours. She said they needed to be provided with \u201cadequate alternative accommodation\u201d by the municipality.<\/p>\n<p>Bhengu explained that it was important that the group be given time to file their answering affidavits. \u201cWe went to court to postpone the matter because it was on the unopposed [court] roll and now it needs to be on the opposed roll. Once we\u2019ve filed our answering affidavits then the City will be given an opportunity to file its replying affidavit.\u201d SERI is to file its answering affidavits to the court by no later than 30 June.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe ideal situation in these circumstances is for the City to provide proper alternative accommodation. There needs to be a long term solution. You can\u2019t keep people in temporary accommodation forever,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n<p>The matter is now set to be heard in October.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<div id=\"article_copyright\">\n<p>\u00a9 2023 GroundUp. This article is licensed under a <a href=\"http:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-nd\/4.0\/\" rel=\"license\">Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>You may republish this article, so long as you credit the authors and GroundUp, and do not change the text. Please include a link back to the original article.<\/p>\n<p>We put an invisible pixel in the article so that we can count traffic to republishers. All analytics tools are solely on our servers. We do not give our logs to any third party. Logs are deleted after two weeks. We do not use any IP address identifying information except to count regional traffic. We are solely interested in counting hits, <b>not tracking<\/b> users. If you republish, please do not delete the invisible pixel.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/04\/last-minute-delay-to-court-hearing-on-eviction-of-homeless-people-on-cape-towns-streets.jpg\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.groundup.org.za\/\">Source: GroundUp<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A group of homeless people, represented by the Socio-Economic Rights Institute of South Africa (SERI), have managed to delay an application by the City of Cape Town to have them evicted from several public sites in the city centre. Archive photo: Matthew Hirsch The City of Cape Town\u2019s application to evict people living on several [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":257842,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[9928,3247],"tags":[28001],"class_list":{"0":"post-257841","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-groundup","8":"category-news","9":"tag-groundup","10":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/04\/last-minute-delay-to-court-hearing-on-eviction-of-homeless-people-on-cape-towns-streets.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/257841","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=257841"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/257841\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/257842"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=257841"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=257841"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=257841"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}