Frankfurt keeps an underground station open for homeless people to stay overnight in winter.
On the pavement in front of the San Francisco City Hall, numbered areas like parking lots mark where homeless people can line up tents, corona-compliant with distance maintenance.
Moscow relies on a bird and ostrich policy: if there was officially no homelessness during the Soviet era because it was considered a manifestation of capitalism, the administration surrenders today to this legacy and leaves it to citizens' initiatives.
Bars, bollards, uncomfortable benches
In this way or similar provisionally, overburdened city administrations channel the growing demands through problems that they regulate elsewhere through displacement: grids, bollards, and often benches with a curvy design prevent people without a home from finding shelter or sleeping in places where they and they Sight of their miserable belongings are undesirable. One thing should be clear: Nobody lives on the street voluntarily. The passer-by knows this and does not want to be reminded, he also knows that these marginalized people eventually led a middle class life, until maybe their job was gone or the family broke up, until an addiction got out of control or the psyche no longer played along. It could be everyone.
“Who's next?” Is the provocative question asked by an excellent exhibition in the Architecture Museum in Munich's Pinakothek der Moderne. Who will end up under the bridge next because they can no longer pay their rent? But above all, how does society deal with homelessness? The exhibition curated by Daniel Talesnik illuminates the problem using the example of eight global cities. In sunny San Francisco, once the hippie capital and center of an alternative way of life, the gap is particularly wide. In the past ten years, the number of homeless people has more than tripled. The boom in the tech industry in nearby Silicon Valley led to the influx of high-income employees and explosive population growth. As a result, rents rose exorbitantly, while the California construction costs,the highest in the United States, hindering affordable housing.
The statistics listed make you dizzy: In Los Angeles, the average rent is 46.7 percent of average income, also because there is a shortage of well over 500,000 affordable apartments.
In São Paulo, the richest city in Latin America, the number of homeless people is estimated to have increased by sixty to seventy percent in the first year of Corona, and in Mumbai 250,000 people now have to see where they stay at night.
The number of affected children as well as old women and men is increasing everywhere.
The dramatic figures show that Europe is still comparatively well off.
The welfare state helps here, even if there is still plenty of room for improvement.