Dead people in the street: what do we do with the homeless?
The housing crisis has its darkest face in homelessness. Ignoring it is not a solution. Letting them die of cold is a disgrace. This is what we, as a society, are doing.
These past few days, with the cold snap, two consecutive deaths have occurred near our homes: one in Badalona and one in Barcelona. In the capital, in the last five weeks (December and January), five people have lost their lives on the street, where they slept. But what they had wasn't exactly life; it was a miserable existence, a subsistence on the edge. They were victims of the intense cold. There will be no moments of silence for those who died abandoned to their misfortune, to their misfortune. They will become part of the statistics of anonymous misery. Nothing more?
In recent weeks, we have witnessed the controversy surrounding the uncertain fate of those evicted from the former B9 school building in Badalona. The city's mayor, Xavier García Albiol, simply wanted to get rid of them. They ended up under a bridge. The joint intervention of the Catalan government and social organizations provided shelter for many of those affected. Not all, though. With the onset of the cold, the City Council finally opened a pavilion away from the bridge, but without beds. After complaints, they added beds. Only pressure from organizations and public opinion prompted a reaction from the Badalona City Council, which responded sluggishly. In Barcelona, following overly strict temperature protocols, no extra measures against the cold were activated until Tuesday night.
Having a home is synonymous with having a minimally dignified life. We already know that there is a lot of substandard housing and precarious living conditions within homes. But when you are left out in the open, without a roof over your head, there is often no going back: you have entered the realm of definitive marginalization. Then, strange as it may seem, even though you are exposed to everyone's eyes, you become invisible to most. We have normalized the poverty of the homeless, of those who drag a cart loaded with scrap metal and junk along the sidewalk, of those who eat and sleep and do everything on the street. Yes: also of those who die.
Letting people die on the street should shame political leaders and society as a whole. We have a problem if we accept it as if nothing is happening. What is wrong with us? How do we explain this moral blindness to our children? How will some officials justify that it's not necessary to help them but rather to expel them, which in practice means leaving them on the street or, even, as we are seeing, exposing them to death? The tendency of the far-right ideological narratives that are contaminating the debate is to dismiss humanitarian discourse as mere feel-goodism. wokeA derogatory adjective used against those who feel empathy, compassion, or solidarity with the vulnerable who are forced into a life of hardship on the streets.
Public social services fall short. Aid organizations are overwhelmed and have been denouncing the situation for some time. We must collectively demand less ideological demagoguery and more grassroots humanitarian action, more solutions for our cities. Above all, homeless people are people.
