European Homelessness and COVID 19
By the European Observatory on Homelessness
Summary
• The COVID-19 pandemic has been causing modifications in responses to homelessness across Europe for just under one year at the time of writing. The situation is fluid, with levels of infection shifting and being met by alterations in plans, policy, and practice. This report describes a situation in which the pandemic is ongoing and the extent and nature of any long-term effects on European homelessness remains uncertain.
• The information presented here is the result of a rapid review, drawing on the experience, contacts, and knowledge of the authors and the other relevant data and reports that could be found. This report should be read as an attempt to bring together what is currently known about the still emergent consequences for homelessness from the pandemic.
• In common with OECD countries, almost all European Member States have introduced some form of eviction ban in response to the pandemic. Various policies, including furlough arrangements and enhancements to social protection, are also enabling people who might otherwise lose housing as a result of unemployment to retain their homes. These policies are temporary.
• Some emergency shelter services have been closed because they were ‘shared air’ services in which people lived and slept in communal areas. Others have been modified. One response has been to change shelters into a ‘quarantined’ services to prevent external infection. This has involved changing shelters from overnight to 24-hour operation, only allowing residents out under strict rules, and not allowing in new residents who exhibit potential symptoms and/or have a positive test. Expansion of existing shelter provision, allowing existing services to enact social distancing (e.g. halving bedspaces), and enabling people experiencing street homelessness to move off the street has also been widespread.
• When the virus has taken hold in a ‘shared air’ service the effects have sometimes been severe, with extremely high infection rates. However, several Member States, including Denmark, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, and Portugal, were initially successful in containing infection rates among people experiencing homelessness. In some cases, the nature of service provision, for example a tendency to provide people experiencing homelessness with their own rooms rather than use shared sleeping areas, facilitated containment of the virus. During the first wave, the UK was also largely successful in containing the virus among people experiencing homelessness, closing a relatively small number of ‘shared air’ services in a context in which many services offered people their own rooms and there was relatively high use of housing-led/Housing First services using ordinary housing.
• The pandemic led to a number of interventions, sometimes using hotels or additional emergency accommodation and temporary accommodation – or some combination of arrangements – that took significant numbers of people experiencing street homelessness off the streets. On a temporary basis, the ‘complex’ problem of street homelessness was largely and rapidly stopped. While there were still operational problems and, sometimes, an ongoing absence of a clear strategy to prevent an eventual return to the streets, there were also reports of gains in wellbeing and health as people who had been experiencing street homelessness were moved into hotels.
• Countries using temporary supported accommodation that offers people their own rooms/apartments and homelessness strategies that lean towards, or are focused on, housing-led/Housing First responses to homelessness appear to have been inherently more resilient in their capacity to manage the pandemic, because those systems meant self-isolation and maintaining lockdown was less complex. This said, there was also evidence of innovative, flexible, and imaginative thinking, alongside strong personal dedication from staff in ‘shared air’ services, that kept these systems up and running – and infection rates among people experiencing homelessness down – in extremely challenging circumstances across several EU Member States.
• The viability of ‘shared air’ services has been brought into further question by the ongoing effects of the pandemic. Following a lead from the highly successful Finnish strategy, several Member States are moving toward increasingly housing-led/Housing First strategies, Ireland and Portugal being among the examples. Some comparisons between the UK, which has moved away from the provision of emergency shelters using a ‘shared air’ approach, and the USA, where ‘shared air’ services are in widespread use, have shown the UK has markedly lower levels of infection. • In the UK, Australia, and elsewhere, commentators have drawn attention to public health concerns, rather than concerns about homelessness, driving new and significant, albeit generally temporary, interventions that have significantly reduced the number of people experiencing street homelessness and emergency shelter use. Effectively reclassifying homelessness as a public health issue has provided momentum for policy change that has reduced levels.
• The impacts of the pandemic on women’s homelessness remain uncertain at the time of writing. There is global, alongside pan-European evidence, of an increase in domestic abuse, which acts as a major trigger of homelessness among women and family homelessness, the latter disproportionately involving lone women parents with dependent children, across Europe. This is an area where policy responses have lagged behind those for people experiencing street homelessness and using emergency shelter.
• It is uncertain how far and how fast homelessness might rise following the lifting of various emergency and temporary measures introduced in response to the pandemic. There is the possibility that some EU Member States and other European countries will simply ‘switch off’ specific measures at a given point, ending eviction bans and extra support for people experiencing street homelessness in an unplanned way, leading to sudden, perhaps significant, spikes in homelessness. However, much depends on how these policies are wound down and, as appears to be the case for a few EU Member States, whether the pandemic has prompted a wider re-think of homelessness policy, prompting reorientation towards more integrated housing-led/Housing First strategies that are likely to produce sustained falls in homelessness.
• The pandemic has highlighted wider questions of housing exclusion across Europe. Beyond homelessness, it is clear that people who are badly housed, often within socially and environmentally degraded built environments, are at significantly higher risk from the virus.