How many more people need to die of exposure on the streets?

How many more people have to die on the streets before we take the rise in homelessness seriously? We've been talking about it more than usual for the past few weeks. The five deaths of people sleeping on the streets of Catalan cities during a cold snap, and the evident increase in the problem in recent times, are filling pages and airtime on television and radio. But we're outraged at how we've normalized thousands of people spending their nights and days rough, while we continue to shift the focus from housing to emergency situations and demand that social services lead actions that, strictly speaking, fall under the purview of civil protection.

The main factor explaining the growth of homelessness in Europe and North America is the housing affordability crisis. The cities that have experienced the greatest increases are those where rents have risen most sharply, driving up the prices of other housing options like room rentals. What we see on the streets is just one form of homelessness. Hot-bedding, overcrowded apartments, spending the night in storage rooms, squatting in disused commercial spaces and industrial buildings… these are informal solutions to the impossibility of finding a place to live due to poverty or real estate racism.

And while the market for unaffordable housing is a lucrative business for some, we debate the temperature at which the thermometer should reach to open overcrowded dormitories or sports halls. All this to extend, for a few days, the temporary accommodation capacity of social services and organizations that are never able to meet needs that are expanding at an unprecedented rate in recent history. And once these spaces are available, we wonder why some people prefer their sleeping bag or a tent to losing their little piece of the city for a precarious, shared roof that will only last three or four days.

However sensible the idea may seem that the problem is solved with more shelters and more beds to accommodate everyone when it's cold, residential centers and the capacity to offer temporary accommodation have grown in parallel with the increase in homelessness in almost every European city. In Barcelona, ​​between 2011 and the present, the number of places offered by the City Council and social organizations has tripled, while the number of people living on the streets has also tripled.

Given the impossibility of housing everyone, social services should not be responsible for accommodating thousands of people in makeshift spaces when life is at risk, because the logic of a temporary expansion of resources simply doesn't work. Social services must focus on social protection and operate with adequate resources year-round. Local governments and social organizations must have the necessary resources to support people experiencing homelessness in rebuilding their lives. But to stop the flow of new people falling into exclusion, it is necessary to curb the escalating housing prices, expand the reach of guaranteed minimum income, and promote preventative policies that require coordination between protection systems under different levels of government.

We know that without structural changes to the housing market, people will remain homeless. Cold, heat, and other unforeseen circumstances require civil protection measures that must be guaranteed to everyone: those who have been sleeping on the streets for years, those who are experiencing homelessness temporarily, and those living in buildings ill-equipped to withstand the cold. When inclement weather, pandemics, or natural disasters put people's lives at risk, we don't need social protection, but rather the deployment of civil protection resources with their own budgets and clear, agreed-upon protocols. It makes no sense to argue every winter over the crumbs that social services can allocate to temporarily expanding shelters in spaces that don't meet the needs of people who want to get off the streets. When the function of public action is to guarantee the protection of physical integrity, it doesn't contribute much to conflate two related but different debates: on the one hand, what to do to reduce homelessness, and on the other, how to protect everyone from the cold and other extreme situations, and how to include in this protection people who are usually excluded from public services.