Stockholm (NordSIP) – In a world increasingly rocked by geopolitical tensions and the associated mass of human tragedies, it is easy to feel overwhelmed by the scale of the problems facing us and miss less violent challenges at home, such as homelessness.
Last week, FEANTSA, the European Federation of National Organisations Working with the Homeless, published its 9th Overview of Housing Exclusion in Europe 2024, the latest edition of its annual report on homelessness in Europe. According to the report, there were over one million (1,287,000) homeless people in Europe in 2023, as estimated by headcounts of rough sleepers, people staying in night shelters and in temporary accommodation. Of these, over 400,000 were children, the report argues.
FEANTSA is organised as a network of 130 independent national organisation from across 29 countries, including Stadsmissionen in Sweden, Vva ry and Y-Säätiö in Finland, and Projekt Udenfor in Denmark.
Defining Homelessness
One of the issues most prominently discussed in the report revolves around the definition of homelessness. There are 6 levels of homelessness, according to the European Typology of Homelessness and housing exclusion (ETHOS), a European categorisation effort that emerged out of the need to coordinate the multitude of national approaches prevailing across the continent. ETHOS categories* attempt to cover all living situations which amount to forms of homelessness across Europe:
- People living rough
- People in emergency accommodation
- People living in accommodation for the homeless
- People living in institutions
- People living in non-conventional dwellings due to lack of housing
- Homeless people living temporarily in conventional housing with family and friends (due to lack of housing)
This nuance is important to understand the parallel experiences of the USA and Europe, Freek Spinnewijn, Director at FEANTSA and one of the co-authors of the report tells NordSIP. “All in all, if we consider both the unsheltered and sheltered homeless population, the figures are more or less the same in Europe and in the USA. The main difference is that the USA has a lot more people sleeping rough, so it is much more visible than in Europe where homelessness involves more cases of people in temporary accommodation.”
Homeless and Child Homeless in Europe
The figures for 2023 published this year represent a 43.6% increase from those presented in FEANTSA’s 8th Overview of Housing Exclusion in Europe 2023, last year. The rise is both due to secular trends as well as to increases in measument, the report argues. “It should be noted that this figure partly testifies to an objective trend in homelessness in certain countries, but it also largely reflects improvements in the accuracy and coverage of counts.”
According to the report, the part of the increase in homelessness that is not attributable to improvements in measurement can be explained by worsening economic conditions, particularly high levels of inflation accompanied by high interest rates, which have burdened indebted European households.
“In 2023, nearly one-fifth of the population under the age of 18, amounting to 15.6 million young people, were living below the poverty threshold. In that same year, 4.2 million children under the age of six in Europe were growing up in families experiencing severe hardship. (…) Combining the economic, social, and material dimensions of poverty in one indicator gives us a picture of a particularly alarming situation. In 2023, nearly one in four children in Europe (24.8%) was at risk of poverty, living in a household with low work intensity, or suffering from severe material and social deprivation,” FEANTSA’s report argues.
Although prominent, children are not the only group facing increased risk of homelessness. “Young people, refugees, LGBTQI+ individuals, ethnic minorities, people with disabilities, and single-parent families struggle more than the general population when it comes to finding decent and affordable housing,” the report explains.
Homelessness in the Nordics
The vast majority of the homeless could be found in the Europe’s largest countries, such as Germany (404,527) and France (209,074). Among the Nordics, Finland and Denmark had an estimated 878 (794 in 2022) and 3,738 (3,378 in 2022) homeless people*, respectively. There were no updated figures for Sweden in FEANTSA’s latest report. However, Swedish social services (“Socialstyrelsen”, the Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare) estimated that as many as 27,380 people were homeless in 2023, according to a February 2024 report. According to Socialstyrelsen, this figures means there were 2,700 more homeless people in Sweden than the last time it conducted this survey in 2017.
Regarding the situation in Denmark, the report explains that “the noteworthy decrease in the number of people forced to spend the night in public spaces is very likely linked to the extended capacity in accommodation centres – between 2021 and 2022, the number of beneficiaries of refuges and homeless shelters increased by 5%. At the same time, national data shows a significant decrease in the number of homeless individuals aged 18-24, which several observers attribute to greater political action on the problem of youth homelessness. In recent years, several cities have deployed support and integration measures specifically targeting homeless young people.”
Finnish municipalities collect homelessness data (for information purposes only because methodologies vary across municipalities) which is published by the Housing Finance and Development Centre of Finland. According to estimates published on 15 November 2023, 3,429 homeless people were identified in Finland*. “Of these, 14% were rough sleeping or in emergency accommodation, 12% were in homeless shelters, 12% were living in an institution due to lack of housing and 32% were staying temporarily with friends or family. Between 2022 and 2023, the total number of homeless individuals decreased by 7%. Notably, the number of women and individuals under 25 experienced particularly significant reductions, with decreases of 17% and 35%, respectively.”
No Progress in Fighting Poverty
According to the FEANTSA report, high inflation, interest rates and household indebtedness are not the only negative developments associated with increasing homelessness. Using Eurostat data, FEANTSA points to the stagnation in poverty rates to illustrate the economic context in which the rise in homelessness has occurred.
“Poverty rates remained stagnant in the European Union. In 2023, almost 71.9 million people, i.e. 16.2% of the population6, were living below the poverty threshold (…) The rates observed were especially high in Greece (28.2%), Bulgaria (29.4%), Romania (31.4%) and were lowest in Luxembourg (5.7%), the Netherlands (5.6%), Sweden (5.5%) and Slovenia (4.9%). Over the course of a year, the proportion of the population affected rose in at least 15 Member States. The most noteworthy hikes were in Denmark (+38.2%), Austria (+46.2%), and Luxembourg (+54.1%).”
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* Some discrepancies between headline FEANTSA figures and detailed figures are due to the fact that detailed figures include a wider definition of homelessness, whereas the headline figures attributed to FEANTSA in this article only include categories ETHOS 1,2 and 3.