At least 18,000 people live homeless in Catalonia. They are 80% more than in 2016 and the figure does not stop increasing. The entities promoting a law of temporary and urgent measures to confront and eradicate homelessness make this estimate, which in itself should be enough for the Parliament to approve said law as quickly as possible. The need to have this legal instrument has broad support from social entities and today has received the endorsement of seven professional associations.
In an event organized together with the Col·legi de Periodistes by the promoters of the law (Community of San Egidio, Sant Joan de Déu Serveis Socials, Arrels Fundació, Càritas Catalunya and Assís Center d’Acollida), the entities that work in this area have presented a joint manifesto in which they reiterate to Parliament the demand for a law that should help alleviate a phenomenon that is manifested in many Catalan municipalities and, especially, in Barcelona. The objective, the signatories of the manifesto point out, is to “ensure the dignity and humanity” of the people who suffer from this scourge and recognize their rights.
The day A law for the rights of homeless people. A dignity law has served to present the support of seven professional associations for the demands of social entities. These are the associations of journalists, lawyers, psychologists, pedagogues, social workers, educators and social and medical educators.
The professor of Administrative Law at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB) Antoni Milian, director of the law proposal, has warned of the existence of “a legal vacuum in the protection of homeless people that is essential to fill if we want to put an end to the suffering and indignity with which they live.”
Milian believes that the approval of the law will allow stability in public policies on homelessness and will favor a more orderly and efficient way of addressing it. In short, it will allow us to “abandon welfare to adopt the logic of rights, which is much more guaranteeing.”
Salvador Maneu, director of Sant Joan de Déu Social Services Barcelona and representative of the five entities promoting the legislative initiative, thanked the professional associations for their support. He has emphasized the fact that homelessness has worsened and no longer respects anyone: young people, older people, women, families, especially single parents, people with jobs but with insufficient salaries to be able to access housing, people with mental illnesses, Spaniards and foreigners… “It is a reality – he stated – that attacks the dignity of the people who suffer from it and that at the same time corrodes the dignity of the entire society that tolerates it.”
Social entities have denounced the presence of structural factors that do not help to solve the problem, such as, above all, the prohibitive price of rents or the consolidation of an asymmetric labor market, which generates unskilled jobs and very precarious conditions. A distressing fact is that the life expectancy of homeless people is about 30 years below that of the general population.
The Law, which reached Parliament in January 2022, aims to put an end, within a maximum period of two years from its entry into force, to situations in which people are forced to sleep outdoors, specified the director of the proposal. For the entities promoting the law, the key figure of the law is “the provision of decent residential service”, which can be offered in various modalities: boarding house, hostel, hotel, residential equipment and insertion housing while sufficient apartments are not available. to house these people. It also includes existing measures, such as registration and access to health and social services and benefits such as the guaranteed citizenship income (RGC) and the minimum vital income (IMV), and creates new rights and services such as showers, locker and laundry, among others.
