Homelessness grows and spreads through Barcelona
One out of five people who sleep on the street is young, according to a report by Arrels
BarcelonaPractically, 2,000 people sleep on the streets of Barcelona every day. It is a high, unprecedented figure that the Arrels Foundation describes as a "record". We are talking about 43% more people in a state of homelessness than in 2023. All of this, according to the entity, evidences the need for basic public policies and the "urgent" approval of the homelessness law.
There are more and more people sleeping on the street and they are dispersing more and more: until now, the Ciutat Vella district had traditionally been the area with the most homeless people, but the latest studies by Arrels have detected that these people are moving to other parts of the city. Sants-Montjuïc is now the district where the most people sleep rough: 489, 134% more than in 2023 (209), followed by Eixample, with 389 (302 in 2023).
It is also worrying that the homelessness situation in the city is becoming chronic. Although the average length of stay on the street has decreased from 4.5 years (2023) to 3.5 years, the change is due to the incorporation of many new people who have been on the street for less than six months. In other words, more people have fallen into this situation than people who have left it. At the same time, 72% of these people have "no expectation" of living in housing. Precisely, the loss of housing is detected as one of the main entry routes to the street. 26.8% of people experiencing homelessness state that the last housing they had was rental, and 8.5% that it was owned.
More and more young people
The average age of people living on the street in Barcelona is 42.7 years. Youth homelessness, however, is on the rise. They are young people between 18 and 29 years old who represent 20.5% of the sample of people sleeping on the street. In 2023 they represented 15%, and this shows a "considerable increase": one in five homeless people is young.
The data show the existence of three differentiated, but simultaneous, dynamics according to age: early entry (young people), consolidation of trajectories (middle ages), and persistence and aging (over 55s). Arrels warns that homelessness is not a homogeneous phenomenon, but rather affects all stages of the life cycle and includes a system of trajectories that begin, consolidate, and become chronic.
Regarding temperature changes and heatwaves, the director of Arrels, Beatriz Fernández, has stressed that it "especially" affects people living on the street, as they can rest less: "The heat has a very direct impact", they emphasize.
