"Street homelessness is just the tip of the iceberg."

"It's very difficult to give an exact figure; we always talk about approximations that also depend on what we mean by homelessness. Organizations working on issues of social exclusion and homelessness estimate around 30,000 people . In the latest 2022 Survey on Homeless People by the National Institute of Statistics (INE), 28,552 people were counted sleeping on the streets or receiving assistance in shelters and food centers. But these figures are always biased; it's impossible to know how many people there are in each of the categories of residential exclusion."

In the case of extreme homelessness, for example, sleeping on the street, the situation is highly variable. Some people spend time on the street, alternating between homelessness and having a roof over their heads, making it a temporary, fluid situation about which we know very little. Few cities have reliable data on the number of people sleeping on their streets, and even then, the data isn't updated regularly and often depends on municipal political will and the involvement of social service organizations. So, we're talking about incomplete data. Regarding the number of people receiving social services, we have data from the National Institute of Statistics (INE), but this doesn't include resources provided by the private sector.

The other major problem is that a large part of homelessness is hidden . There are people in situations of extreme housing vulnerability who have been in this situation for a long time, but who are not physically on the street nor receiving assistance from homeless services. They alternate between boarding houses, the homes of family or acquaintances, brief periods of homelessness before returning to renting rooms, and so on. So it's very difficult to give a figure, although it's important to try.

"These situations may not fit the stereotype of someone sleeping on a park bench for years, but they closely resemble homelessness and derail life plans. For example, evicted families who move into substandard or unsafe housing—other categories of residential exclusion—make it very difficult for them to develop a fulfilling life. This includes families living in a single room, people constantly moving from friend's house to friend's, and people living in uninhabitable, provided premises..."

And when we observe the phenomenon from a gender perspective , we realize the importance of hidden homelessness. In counts of people experiencing homelessness, women always represent between 10 and 15%. With this data, we might think that homelessness affects women less than men, but the reality is that the processes of residential exclusion for men and women are very different. Women prioritize having a roof over their heads, even if it means living in situations of power imbalances and abuse that are very harmful to them, rather than remaining on the street due to the inherent insecurity. For a woman, being on the street is more dangerous than for a man, and therefore she will do whatever it takes to avoid it, but that doesn't mean she is much better off in her current situation. It makes us realize that not everything is visible, that this visible homelessness is just the tip of the iceberg.

Rethinking the model of migrant reception

"In recent years we tried to explain that homelessness is a housing problem and that we needed to move beyond the paradigm of treating homeless people as individuals with extremely complex life situations who, until these issues are resolved, will be unable to afford housing. Today, I no longer dare to categorically maintain this assertion because homelessness is a housing problem, but also a problem of migrant reception ."

In a city like Barcelona, where the data is quite reliable, 70% of the people sleeping on the streets and those receiving assistance from social services are foreign nationals. The increase in homelessness is primarily driven by the migrant population, as the number of homeless Spaniards is the same today as it was in 2008.

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In the case of the migrant population, we find not only a problem of irregular status, which is also a factor, but also a problem of uprooting, loneliness, and the breakdown of support networks when migration processes fail. Most migrants in our cities neither access social services nor are they homeless. Their relationship to the labor market is significantly more precarious than that of the rest of the population, and they suffer a greater accumulation of factors contributing to social exclusion, but these are not the factors that lead them to homelessness. However, there is greater vulnerability, and this ultimately translates into a higher proportion of migrants experiencing severe social exclusion than the native population.

"In the case of the city of Barcelona, through social services, censuses, and some recent research, we observed that the notable increase in the number of people sleeping on the streets up to 2018 was primarily driven by migrants from EU countries. There was an increase in people from non-EU countries, but it was lower than the increase from EU countries."

From 2018 onwards, these proportions have become more balanced. This can be linked to the increased arrival of undocumented migrants at the southern border, often in very precarious situations, and to migration patterns characterized by irregularity, repression, and mental health problems stemming from the hardships of the journey. Here, there has been an increase in the number of people of African origin experiencing homelessness.

Regarding the reception of people in the homeless shelters themselves, the problem is that these shelters have become the last line of defense . Given the failure of all other protection and migrant reception systems, the homeless shelter network ends up becoming the last resort for people who have nothing else .

Messages are often disseminated to the public that attempt to reinforce the stereotype of foreigners as "taking advantage" of the abundance of the Spanish welfare system. To bolster this idea, they cling to statistics on the number of people served by homeless shelters or the obvious racialization of those queuing for food. But, in reality, it's quite the opposite: there is nothing else for these people; only the last line of defense—the shelters and food distribution programs—remains, because nothing else works.

“I am very concerned about the limitations of the current migration reception systems . We are going to see more people requesting international asylum in a system that systematically rejects applications. These people become undocumented migrants and are denied social protection rights. All these rejections end up at the doors of social services. I think we are facing an urgent need to rethink our role as host societies . European policies tend to become increasingly restrictive, and the increasingly pervasive discourse of rejection only generates more exclusion. Greater rejection will not stop migration flows, especially not in a context of global conflict, plus the climate crisis, plus everything else that may arise in the coming years.”

"Previously, the logic of social intervention viewed homelessness as a street phenomenon, occurring in public spaces, which should be addressed by social services and resolved with temporary accommodation, as a space where recovery could be worked on. This entire logic has evolved over the years as we have gained a better understanding of the profile of the people served (who are not just passing through, but rather stay in the cities) and as we have realized that their problems cannot be solved in a few days, since..." Having experienced homelessness on the streets adds complexity to these individuals' situations due to the impact it has on their self-esteem and their mental and physical health . Therefore, limiting accommodation to three days, as was done previously, no longer made sense. Another significant step forward came with the recognition of human rights and the value of aspects such as privacy, personal autonomy, and the capacity to make decisions . The aim has been to avoid institutionalization , especially with the advent of care models like Housing First , a methodology that has become the paradigm for how care should be provided to homeless people with very complex needs.

All this evolution has been implemented in the care of homeless people in street cases, but it has also helped us to understand that the services we offer to other types of homelessness, less chronic, can be organized differently and move towards person-centered care.

Alongside this evolution in care, we have seen a dramatic increase in demand due to the housing crisis, which began in 2008 and from which the low-income population has never recovered. This has made these service transformations impossible to implement in some centers due to excessive demand and the workload of the staff.

"In Europe, no country has managed to reduce homelessness except Finland. But it's important to explain Finland's strategy , which they began implementing almost 30 years ago. It's crucial to understand that a nationwide agreement was reached among all levels of government, from the national to the local, not to use homelessness as a political weapon. This is quite atypical in Europe, but it was key to ensuring everyone worked together."

On the one hand, they implemented a massive housing solution strategy for the homeless using a Housing First model, and now they only maintain one emergency shelter, effectively eliminating the number of people sleeping on the streets. On the other hand, and perhaps even more importantly than Housing First , they implemented a highly aggressive prevention strategy , with substantial funding, to prevent people in highly vulnerable situations from becoming homeless. This was achieved through a robust social housing stock, support programs, and financial aid. In other words, Finland has focused on preventing the ship from taking on water rather than trying to fill it with increasingly larger buckets.

We have important tasks to accomplish here: tackling social exclusion and the problem we have with the housing market, which is a problem of legislative regulation. In Spain, we have lost many years in housing policy because the strategy has consisted of building public housing to sell as subsidized housing, meaning that public administrations have not accumulated a stock of housing for social use and rental. Expanding the stock of public housing is absolutely essential to address the situation, along with changes in the approach to migrant reception. We must ask ourselves what we are doing to make being a migrant in Europe, and specifically in Spain, so difficult and put people at much greater risk of ending up on the street than native-born people.

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“I think that constructing a subject of study and a subject of social intervention called 'homelessness' has been very effective in distancing ourselves from it. For example, when we talk about the right to housing, there are certain social actors involved (tenants' unions, the platform for people affected by mortgages), but when we talk about homelessness, the actors are different. They aren't the people affected, because their organizational capacity is minimal; they are the organizations that serve these homeless people, and that puts us in a different position because they are 'the others.' That is, we can empathize with someone whose rent goes up, but not with 'the others' because that can't happen to me, but we must understand that the root problem is the same.”

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Quiz

It's about understanding that this is a housing problem, not one of social exclusion, much less one of marginal behavior, involvement in crime, or habits outside the norms established by society. Breaking down this barrier of understanding it as a housing problem and comprehending the reality of migrants and how they make decisions helps us to empathize a little more.

Regarding the model of care for homeless people in Catalonia  

"The development of this model for assisting homeless people in Catalonia stems from a growing political awareness that this issue must be addressed across the entire region, even though we already know that people experiencing homelessness are concentrated in metropolitan areas. Work on this strategy began in 2016. In 2023, the model will be made available so that all basic social services departments in Catalonia can work with common guidelines should they detect a homelessness problem in their areas."

To implement this model, the aim is to reach a consensus among social organizations working on this issue and the relevant public administrations on how to address the situation. Essentially, the plan focuses on the recovery process for these individuals, using a person-centered approach. Initial contact, the provision of basic needs, and the initial reception are considered opportunities to build a relationship with the person. A recovery plan is then proposed, developed collaboratively with the individual and implemented through their residential care facility. This plan addresses various aspects of their life, such as access to healthcare, legal matters, and support in rebuilding family ties or support networks. The goal is to reach the exit phase, where follow-up can be provided by the social services of the municipality where the person resides. It is important to recognize that this process is not linear; people experiencing homelessness may move between situations, and interventions must be adapted accordingly.

The model is being designed in conjunction with other areas of the Generalitat, such as the Department of Health, child protection services, and prison services, to prevent the end of an institutionalization process from leading to homelessness.