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A Snapshot of Homelessness Policies Around the U.S. and the World
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David P.
Dec 1, 2022, 3:59:59 AM12/1/22
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A Snapshot of Homelessness Policies Around the U.S. and the World
By The New York Times, Nov. 30, 2022
Hong Kong
---------
In East Asian cities, homelessness tends to be far less common than it is in the United States. But the problem does exist, and in some places it worsened during the pandemic as some of the working poor were unable to afford housing in expensive real estate markets.
Hong Kong, a Chinese territory with high rates of inequality, is one of several East Asian cities where homeless people have for years sheltered in plain sight, including at 24-hour McDonald’s restaurants. The number of people registered as “street sleepers” in the territory roughly doubled over a seven-year period, to more than 1,500 last year, according to a government report — slightly more than the reported figure in Singapore, another wealthy banking hub in the region.
Data on mental health issues among Hong Kong’s homeless population is scarce. A widely cited 2015 academic survey of 97 homeless people found that more than half suffered from a mental illness — and that most were not receiving psychiatric care.
Hong Kong typically provides subsidized hostels for stays of up to six months, but social workers and other experts have said that the time limit should be extended. They have also asked the government to invest more in public housing and to stop clearing homeless encampments in parks and other public places.
London
-------
Homelessness in London and other parts of England has been on the rise in the past decade, a product of a broader housing crisis in the country that has been exacerbated by surging property and rental prices in the capital.
There were signs that the trend was beginning to reverse course in recent years, most markedly during the pandemic, when the government mandated that local councils provide emergency accommodation to people living on the streets. From fall 2019 to fall 2020, the number of people “rough sleeping” in London on any given night dropped by 44 percent.
Those gains could be short-lived. As Britain battles soaring inflation and rising fuel costs that threaten to worsen a cost-of-living crisis, homelessness appears to be back on the rise.
According to official data, the number of people sleeping on the streets of London from July to September this year increased by almost 25 percent, compared with the same period last year. More than half were doing so for the first time.
With housing advocates raising alarms as winter approaches, Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, has called on the central government to enact a raft of measures, including freezing private sector rents.
The capital this year committed about 36.6 million pounds, or about $43.8 million, toward ending street homelessness. When temperatures are forecast to drop below freezing in the city, a protocol allows charities and councils to open more emergency shelters.
The British government said in September that in an effort to tackle homelessness it would commit £2 billion on resources such as more beds, alcohol and drug treatment programs and support staff to improve access to mental health services and to help people find jobs.
Nairobi, Kenya
--------------
Homelessness has soared in the Kenyan capital in recent years, especially among children. By most estimates, at least 250,000 people in the city of more than four million live without proper shelter, including tens of thousands of youngsters who eke out a precarious existence on the streets. The homeless population includes orphans and children fleeing conflict in neighboring countries, as well as women escaping domestic abuse.
Their plight was highlighted recently when Johnson Sakaja, the recently elected Nairobi governor, met a homeless boy during a visit to a roadworks project and vowed to put him through school. “This young man touched my heart,” Mr. Sakaja said.
The authorities are not always so caring. Homelessness is linked to the city’s vast shanty towns, among the largest in Africa, which are built on public or disputed land. Forced evictions are common. In 2020, police officers evicted 7,000 people from shanty areas in the city, leaving them homeless at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Human rights groups have accused the police of using excessive force against homeless people, including extrajudicial killings. In 2019, Human Rights Watch accused Nairobi police officers of unlawfully killing at least 21 men and boys, some homeless, in the Dandora and Mathare neighborhoods.
Rome
---------
Homelessness is an entrenched problem in Rome, regularly making news each winter as temperatures drop and people die from exposure to the cold. Three people have died so far this fall, despite relatively mild temperatures.
There are an estimated 8,000 to 10,000 homeless people in Rome, according to Carlo Santoro, who oversees policies for the homeless for the Community of Sant’Egidio, a Rome-based Roman Catholic charity that offers a variety of services, including dormitories. The city has a population of about 2.8 million.
Over the past year, the city’s social services department has increased the number of beds and services to assist the homeless, and it has a round-the-clock operations center that monitors the number of beds available each night. People with mental illness are handled by the local health authorities, and the response can vary widely.
As part of an outreach effort, the social services department in Rome has also deployed a camper on the streets to have one-to-one interactions with homeless people who sometimes shy away from shelters. This month, the department announced that it would work with charities and organizations that assist the homeless and others in poverty to draft new guidelines to improve services.
Barbara Funari, the councilwoman responsible for the department, said in a statement this year that she was hunting for funds so that assistance for the homeless would become more structural, “moving away from the logic of emergency.”
In 2016, Sant’Egidio began managing a shelter for the homeless inside the grounds of the Gemelli hospital, where homeless people are given lodging but also medical and social assistance. In September, another center to assist homeless people opened at the San Giovanni hospital in Rome.
“Generally, with the cold, hospital emergency rooms are taken by storm by the homeless because they are warm, so the idea to create spaces within them has been a positive experience,” Mr. Santoro of Sant’Egidio said.
Sydney, Australia
--------------------
Despite soaring rents and home prices, Australia’s largest city has managed to significantly reduce homelessness over the past five years through programs that combine immediate intervention with public and nonprofit services that include long-term follow-up.
Homelessness has been gradually declining in Sydney ever since the introduction of the Supported Transition and Engagement Program in 2018, which rapidly rehouses the homeless while also providing drug and alcohol counseling, health care and crisis support. In February 2017, the City of Sydney’s count tallied 433 “rough sleepers” on the streets. This year, in a city of 5.3 million people, that figure had been reduced to 225.
In part, Sydney has built on the strength of its pandemic response. With help from the police, who are empowered under a 2002 law to move people on from public places if they harass anyone or cause others to be fearful, the government paid for homeless people to stay in hotels and affordable apartments as Covid started to peak in 2020. Social service groups connected with the population at that point, helping to foster trust with those who were often difficult to engage.
Australia generally has also benefited from a stock of public housing that, while much smaller than that of many European countries, still houses nearly 4 percent of the population, compared to 1 percent in the United States. It’s not enough — the wait list for so-called social housing in Sydney and the state of New South Wales is 50,000 people long — but with nationalized health care and a robust welfare system, homelessness has not reached anywhere near the levels that can be found in New York or San Francisco, and the trend lines are going down not up.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/30/us/homeless-policies-new-york-world.html
By The New York Times, Nov. 30, 2022
Hong Kong
---------
In East Asian cities, homelessness tends to be far less common than it is in the United States. But the problem does exist, and in some places it worsened during the pandemic as some of the working poor were unable to afford housing in expensive real estate markets.
Hong Kong, a Chinese territory with high rates of inequality, is one of several East Asian cities where homeless people have for years sheltered in plain sight, including at 24-hour McDonald’s restaurants. The number of people registered as “street sleepers” in the territory roughly doubled over a seven-year period, to more than 1,500 last year, according to a government report — slightly more than the reported figure in Singapore, another wealthy banking hub in the region.
Data on mental health issues among Hong Kong’s homeless population is scarce. A widely cited 2015 academic survey of 97 homeless people found that more than half suffered from a mental illness — and that most were not receiving psychiatric care.
Hong Kong typically provides subsidized hostels for stays of up to six months, but social workers and other experts have said that the time limit should be extended. They have also asked the government to invest more in public housing and to stop clearing homeless encampments in parks and other public places.
London
-------
Homelessness in London and other parts of England has been on the rise in the past decade, a product of a broader housing crisis in the country that has been exacerbated by surging property and rental prices in the capital.
There were signs that the trend was beginning to reverse course in recent years, most markedly during the pandemic, when the government mandated that local councils provide emergency accommodation to people living on the streets. From fall 2019 to fall 2020, the number of people “rough sleeping” in London on any given night dropped by 44 percent.
Those gains could be short-lived. As Britain battles soaring inflation and rising fuel costs that threaten to worsen a cost-of-living crisis, homelessness appears to be back on the rise.
According to official data, the number of people sleeping on the streets of London from July to September this year increased by almost 25 percent, compared with the same period last year. More than half were doing so for the first time.
With housing advocates raising alarms as winter approaches, Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, has called on the central government to enact a raft of measures, including freezing private sector rents.
The capital this year committed about 36.6 million pounds, or about $43.8 million, toward ending street homelessness. When temperatures are forecast to drop below freezing in the city, a protocol allows charities and councils to open more emergency shelters.
The British government said in September that in an effort to tackle homelessness it would commit £2 billion on resources such as more beds, alcohol and drug treatment programs and support staff to improve access to mental health services and to help people find jobs.
Nairobi, Kenya
--------------
Homelessness has soared in the Kenyan capital in recent years, especially among children. By most estimates, at least 250,000 people in the city of more than four million live without proper shelter, including tens of thousands of youngsters who eke out a precarious existence on the streets. The homeless population includes orphans and children fleeing conflict in neighboring countries, as well as women escaping domestic abuse.
Their plight was highlighted recently when Johnson Sakaja, the recently elected Nairobi governor, met a homeless boy during a visit to a roadworks project and vowed to put him through school. “This young man touched my heart,” Mr. Sakaja said.
The authorities are not always so caring. Homelessness is linked to the city’s vast shanty towns, among the largest in Africa, which are built on public or disputed land. Forced evictions are common. In 2020, police officers evicted 7,000 people from shanty areas in the city, leaving them homeless at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Human rights groups have accused the police of using excessive force against homeless people, including extrajudicial killings. In 2019, Human Rights Watch accused Nairobi police officers of unlawfully killing at least 21 men and boys, some homeless, in the Dandora and Mathare neighborhoods.
Rome
---------
Homelessness is an entrenched problem in Rome, regularly making news each winter as temperatures drop and people die from exposure to the cold. Three people have died so far this fall, despite relatively mild temperatures.
There are an estimated 8,000 to 10,000 homeless people in Rome, according to Carlo Santoro, who oversees policies for the homeless for the Community of Sant’Egidio, a Rome-based Roman Catholic charity that offers a variety of services, including dormitories. The city has a population of about 2.8 million.
Over the past year, the city’s social services department has increased the number of beds and services to assist the homeless, and it has a round-the-clock operations center that monitors the number of beds available each night. People with mental illness are handled by the local health authorities, and the response can vary widely.
As part of an outreach effort, the social services department in Rome has also deployed a camper on the streets to have one-to-one interactions with homeless people who sometimes shy away from shelters. This month, the department announced that it would work with charities and organizations that assist the homeless and others in poverty to draft new guidelines to improve services.
Barbara Funari, the councilwoman responsible for the department, said in a statement this year that she was hunting for funds so that assistance for the homeless would become more structural, “moving away from the logic of emergency.”
In 2016, Sant’Egidio began managing a shelter for the homeless inside the grounds of the Gemelli hospital, where homeless people are given lodging but also medical and social assistance. In September, another center to assist homeless people opened at the San Giovanni hospital in Rome.
“Generally, with the cold, hospital emergency rooms are taken by storm by the homeless because they are warm, so the idea to create spaces within them has been a positive experience,” Mr. Santoro of Sant’Egidio said.
Sydney, Australia
--------------------
Despite soaring rents and home prices, Australia’s largest city has managed to significantly reduce homelessness over the past five years through programs that combine immediate intervention with public and nonprofit services that include long-term follow-up.
Homelessness has been gradually declining in Sydney ever since the introduction of the Supported Transition and Engagement Program in 2018, which rapidly rehouses the homeless while also providing drug and alcohol counseling, health care and crisis support. In February 2017, the City of Sydney’s count tallied 433 “rough sleepers” on the streets. This year, in a city of 5.3 million people, that figure had been reduced to 225.
In part, Sydney has built on the strength of its pandemic response. With help from the police, who are empowered under a 2002 law to move people on from public places if they harass anyone or cause others to be fearful, the government paid for homeless people to stay in hotels and affordable apartments as Covid started to peak in 2020. Social service groups connected with the population at that point, helping to foster trust with those who were often difficult to engage.
Australia generally has also benefited from a stock of public housing that, while much smaller than that of many European countries, still houses nearly 4 percent of the population, compared to 1 percent in the United States. It’s not enough — the wait list for so-called social housing in Sydney and the state of New South Wales is 50,000 people long — but with nationalized health care and a robust welfare system, homelessness has not reached anywhere near the levels that can be found in New York or San Francisco, and the trend lines are going down not up.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/30/us/homeless-policies-new-york-world.html
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