Amelia Earnest met some of the people living on the streets of Cape Town. Some of them have been living outside since they were children. The City recently made it harder for them, though. By GROUNDUP.

Gregory and his wife had lived in the same home for twelve years. Returning from a quick outing one day, they found it was gone. Gregory, who describes himself as forty years homeless, had been living in a shelter underneath "the unfinished bridge." This is the elevated freeway that the City infamously abandoned in 1977, citing a lack of funding.

According to Gregory, city workers began tearing down the informal community sheltered under the cut-off freeway in January or February of 2013. In its place, construction crews built a parking lot to house buses for the City's new Integrated Rapid Transit (IRT) project.

Photo: The CCID installed sharp rocks in the early months of 2013 to deter street people from sleeping under the freeway.

Outside the perimeter of the bus lot, workers constructed a perplexing installation - a sprawling grid of tightly spaced rocks, planted vertically in the cement. The rocks, each around 30cm high, serve no obvious aesthetic or functional purpose...