New Safe Space Homeless Shelter Opens in Durbanville!

Photo Credit: City of Cape Town

A new Safe Space shelter has opened in Durbanville, offering a life-line space for the homeless to start turning their lives around:

Durbanville, South Africa (05 April 2024) — A new Safe Space shelter for the homeless has opened in Cape Town’s Durbanville—an important first pitstop on the road to a brighter future!

For many, Safe Space shelters are more than places of refuge from the harsh realities of street living. They are the places where healing can begin. Dignity can be regained. And an environment where a roadmap to personal development can help be the difference between a life of hardships, or a triumph over adversity telling.

The new shelter houses 40 beds as well as all the social programmes City Safe Spaces focuses on.

These include helpful ways (facilitated by social workers) to reunite the homeless with loved ones, get them back into the workforce and off any substances and skills training on their journey back into societal reintegration.

This holistic social model has proven to be promising, with the City of Cape Town sharing that 3500 are helped get off the streets sustainably, every year.

“The programme has an 83% success rate for clients, addressing a key driver of why people end up on the streets,” adds Councillor Patricia van der Ross.

In Durbanville, like many other areas in Cape Town, homelessness is a community concern. Adding the new shelter is one way that the City is actively working to improve the homeless communities’ chances, and there will be more to come.

A 300-bed Safe Space is on the cards for Green Point, set to be opened in the coming months as part of the City’s R220 million budget (for a three-year period) to expand and continue its Safe Space transitional shelters. According to Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis, the City is spending even more than this figure.

But, the Mayor also indicates that the responsibility to choose to make use of the help available, lies with the individual.

“Accepting social assistance to get off the streets is the best choice for dignity, health and well-being. No person has the right to reserve a public space as exclusively theirs, while indefinitely refusing all offers of shelter and social assistance,” Mayor Hill-Lewis said.