Homelessness is not only the absence of a roof, as our policy language teaches us. It is not a gap between the houses we need and those we build, which can be closed with faster construction or higher subsidy. Chronic homelessness takes away something more – the future a person might have grown into, and the place in which such growth ought to take place. Experiencing homelessness is often compounded by harms that began long before they could be comprehended – childhood adversity, exacerbated by life on the street: substance abuse, violence, brushes with the law, and societal rejection. 

In isiZulu, people ask, “uhlala kuphi?” – “Where do you stay?” The verb ukuhlala means both to dwell and to remain: to have a place to stay and to be found. And because umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu (a person is a person through other persons), someone who cannot be found cannot fully be a person among others. This is what we mean when we say, “Homelessness is flourishing denied.” 

“Flourishing denied” – being cut loose from the place that makes connection possible. 

Homelessness shows that flourishing is not a straight line but a cycle of recurring crises that swallow what little a person has, leaving them not on a path to a better life but in a constant struggle for survival.  

Our Constitution knows losing one’s place is dignity-destroying 

This denial of flourishing has an administrative face. An address is the state’s condition for recognising a person: to register a birth, hold an ID, receive a grant, answer a job advert. Take it away and the person becomes unreachable, cut off from the state that owes them constitutional protection. If hunger empties the plate, homelessness takes away the room in which any plate might be set.

Our Constitution is honest about this tension. Section 26(1) gives everyone the right of access to adequate housing; section 26(2) qualifies it as realisable progressively, within the scope of available resources. But section 26(3) carries no such qualification: no one may be evicted from their home without a court order weighing all the circumstances. Section 28(1)(c), the child’s right to shelter, is also unqualified. The Constitution knows that losing one’s place is a dignity-destroying harm, unable to wait for a convenient budget. 

In the Grootboom case of 2000, the Constitutional Court found a housing programme with nothing for those in desperate need to be unreasonable. Despite this finding, Irene Grootboom was still living in a shack when she died in 2008. A line of eviction cases followed, establishing that the duty to shelter follows the person, not the title deed. Dladla (2017) struck down shelter rules that locked residents out by day and split husbands from wives at night; Ngomane (2019) awarded damages to homeless people whose possessions the city administration had destroyed. Then, on 2 July 2026, in Adonisi, the ConCourt declared the 2015 sale of the Tafelberg site in Cape Town unlawful and ordered the province and city to report on delivering affordable housing in central Cape Town. It does what Grootboom did not: it names a place, ties a duty to it, and keeps watch until met.

Homelessness is not the state’s doing alone

We would end there, had the Prevention of Illegal Eviction Amendment Bill, published on 16 April 2026, not allowed evictions even where there is no alternative accommodation, and created new crimes for anyone who incites or allows occupation – including imprisonment, fines of up to R2 million, and forfeiture of assets. The organisations closest to those affected want the Bill withdrawn. It turns the constitutional order on its head: the court, meant to weigh the circumstances of the displaced, becomes the instrument of their removal.

Homelessness is not the state’s doing alone. It is produced by private choices – buildings left empty while the market rises, public land sold when most needed, a rental market in which the deposit alone is a wall. And it is the long afterlife of apartheid’s spatial order in the form of pass laws, the Group Areas Act, the forced removals that emptied District Six and Sophiatown, surviving in by-laws that make it an offence to sleep, sit, or wash in public.