Barcelona will add 78 more places to care for homeless people on days of intense cold.

BarcelonaBarcelona will increase the number of places available for homeless people during the colder months: from the current 100 to 178, and will reinforce its outreach teams with twelve new members. This was announced by the Deputy Mayor for Social Rights, Raquel Gil, during the first meeting of the City Roundtable against Homelessness. The measure aims to "size" current municipal services to respond to the increase in homeless citizens in the Catalan capital.

According to the Arrels Foundation 2,000 people sleep on the streetThe session also served to begin defining the four working groups that make up the committee: data and census, public space, support network and pathways, and combating aporophobia (fear of the poor). Gil explained that the meeting involved sharing diagnostic data on "the numbers and profiles of people" experiencing homelessness and stated that, given the increase in citizens in this situation, the City Council has already announced two initial measures. She recalled that every winter the council launches Operation Cold in its prevention phase, a program that has been active this year since December 2nd and provides approximately one hundred spaces for people experiencing homelessness. Although the emergency situation is activated and the number of spaces increases when there are alerts or pre-alerts for low temperatures, the governing team has decided to "increase the available spaces in the prevention phase regardless of whether there is a situation of very intense cold." The city council has also announced that the facilities that operated during the emergency phase will reopen before the end of January, with the intention that they "last throughout the entire cold season." This will increase capacity from 100 to 178 spaces, an expansion that, according to Gil, "will help us begin to understand the scale" of the phenomenon.