For Ronald Mashaya, a few sheets of plastic, an old groundsheet and a torn blanket held together with wire and string had been his home and shelter from the elements for the past six months.
But when city officials broke down Mashaya's shelter at the weekend, their diary entry read: "Rubble removed."
The dejected Mashaya, 46, who arrived in Cape Town two years ago from the Eastern Cape hoping to find work, was one of several homeless people who were driven off the verges of the N1 on Sunday.
In a joint operation involving police and city law enforcement, people living in bushes on the verges of the freeway between the Koeberg Road Interchange and Kraaifontein were targeted.
An officer who took part in the pre-dawn operation, which started in the rain early on Sunday, said the "clean-up" had come about after a homeless woman, knocked down on the freeway near Goodwood in June, caused another accident which cost the lives of three people, including a firefighter.
And just hours after Sunday's clean-up operation, a traffic patrol car knocked down and killed another homeless person on the N1 near Century City.
Mashaya had chosen to live on his own on the verge of the freeway to escape the crime and violence of informal settlements.
However, police said people like him endangered the lives of motorists when they crossed the freeway.
"I have nothing and I live from one casual job to the next," Mashaya said.
"My home was just bits of plastic and now that's gone too. There is no place in shelters. I can't work if I can't sleep," he said.
The operation, which took most of Sunday, did not target a denser population of homeless people living in more substantial structures next to Table Bay Boulevard, which is the extension of the N1 into the city's CBD.
Metro Police director Joseph Ross said the operation was also for the benefit of homeless people who endangered their own lives by living on the freeway.
"The operation will be ongoing, and it also includes assistance from us to place them in shelters where space is available," said Ross.
He said recent incidents of stone-throwing on the freeway, and not only accidents caused by the homeless crossing the road, had been another motive for the operation.
Late in June a runaway truck crashed into a fire engine tending to the injured pedestrian on the N1 near Goodwood.
A senior Goodwood firefighter, the injured pedestrian, and a tow-truck driver tending to the initial accident, died at the scene.
Six other people were seriously injured and seven others, including firefighters and a Metro Police officer, received minor injuries.