Exploring the lived experience of street homelessness in Cape Town, South Africa

With increasing rates of poverty and widening inequality in South Africa, the number of people living on the streets in urban centres is steadily increasing. The street homeless live precarious and transient lives. Studies on homelessness point to a lack of housing as the main driver of street homelessness and fail to consider the social, political and economic features of contemporary South Africa that fuel homelessness. There is limited support available to people living on the streets. There is also limited qualitative research that documents the experiences of this group of citizens. Such research is a crucial starting point for creating partnerships with people living on the streets, connecting them to organisations that can offer support and designing programmes and support services that address their expressed needs. Given this background, the purpose of our research was to explore the lived experiences of the street homeless in urban Cape Town. Our research adopted qualitative research design and data was collected using a semi-structured interview format. Persons over the age of 18 years and who have lived and slept on the streets without the use of shelters for 12 months or longer were recruited to participate in our research. Data was analysed using thematic analysis. Our research findings show that people living on the streets experience ongoing social suffering and structural violence that threaten their health and well-being. Our findings provide insight into the lived realities and expressed needs of the street homeless in urban Cape Town and can serve as the starting point for the designing interventions that address the needs of this vulnerable, marginalised and under-served population.

From isolation towards a feeling of being-in-relation-to the world: homelessness community-based experiencie

The decline in social, economic, cultural and political rights in Latin America, expressed in regressive and punitive public policies, translates into a commitment to living conditions and economic increases in poverty. Homelessness turns into one way in which poverty is institutionalized in urban centers. It constitutes a social relationship, where the ephemeral becomes constant, that figures stigmatized identities. The public space is where homeless people ´s everyday life occurs. Among social parks, streets, markets, subway stations, institutions and other spaces, it´s possible to distinguished legitimate and non-legitimate uses of public space (Di Masso, 2012). In contrast of an unequal social distribution of public space according to class, gender, ethnicity, age, emerge resistances practices that express requests in terms of enforceability of rights.
This is how Mutantur or “Mutant Tourism” arises as a community-based intervention with homeless people. It is co-managed by the National University of Avellaneda and a social organization: Popular Assembly Plaza Dorrego-San Telmo. The Mutantur is a tourism experience for the integration that has been developed since 2017 in the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires, Argentina. Focus on participation and empowerment, it takes guided tours that propose access to the city, accessing the culture and heritage.
This community experience becomes a tool to problematizing integration-segregation dynamics that configure the use of cities, as well as collective processes of appropriation of public space. In this sense, in this work we focus on identifying subjective, collective and community transformations and also, we discuss how community interventions problematized the relationship homelessness-public space and knowledge-power.

Hidden Homelessness: New Research on Doubling Up

Homelessness is an international issue of particular salience in developed nations and urban areas where it draws attention to the gap between rich and poor. However, most of this attention is paid to visible or “literal” homelessness, such as those on the streets, in encampments, and in shelters. But what about people who are unable to afford their own housing but find tenuous places to stay? Definitions of homelessness vary both within and across countries, but in the United States, government counts tend not to include individuals who are “doubling up,” staying with family or friends because housing of their own is out of reach. Nevertheless, research suggests that doubling up can have detrimental effects and is often a precursor to literal homelessness. In response, a research-community partnership began to look more closely at this hidden form of housing insecurity. Using publicly available U.S. Census Bureau data on households, we created a measure of doubling up that considers economic hardship, overcrowding, and a person’s relationship to the householder. We compare rates of doubling up to rates of literal homelessness, explore individual and household characteristics associated with doubling up, and investigate geographic variation across the country. This work adds to existing efforts to enumerate homelessness and suggests that current methods may underestimate the extent of homelessness in the United States. In addition to using the measure for scholarship, we plan to disseminate it widely through a toolkit for community organizations in the U.S. who want to generate and use their own data to inform policy. Finally, we hope that our conceptual framework can inform the creation of similar measures tailored for data from other countries.

Working with people experiencing homelessness: The SE-PRO questionnaire

In Europe there is a widespread transition of homeless services from the Traditional Staircase model (TS) to the Housing First model (HF) that is changing the way service providers work with people experiencing homelessness. Nevertheless, few studies are focused on social providers’ prospective and factors affecting their work and there are not specific instruments to analyze the working context of the service providers working with marginalized people.
The aim of the current research was to develop a questionnaire aimed at identifying different profiles of organizations working with people experiencing homelessness. The SErvice PROviders questionnaire (SE-PRO Q) includes several areas that are critical to their functioning, e.g. system of values, workload, leadership, support among colleagues. A first set of items was developed through a content analysis of photovoice projects conducted with service providers in 8 European countries. After several discussions, an agreement was made on the selection of 100 items out of 564, following different criteria (e.g., overlapping of content, balance between categories).
The 100-item version of the SE-PRO was administered in 8 countries. Preliminary analyses showed a good internal consistency for most of the subscales included in the questionnaire. A confirmatory factor analysis partially confirmed the hypothesized structure of the questionnaire. A theoretical model linking the organizational profile of the organizations to providers’ well-being (in terms of burnout, work engagement) was also evaluated. The potential benefits of profiling homeless services in order to identify their strengths and weaknesses and promote their efficacy will be discussed.