European Research Conference – Housing First. What’s Second?

Since 1989, FEANTSA (European Federation of National Organisations working with the Homeless) is working in Brussels as a European non-governmental organization. Recently, the 8th European Research Conference of FEANTSA took place in Berlin. The issue at hand was a North-American program and its usefulness for European situations: »Housing First. What’s Second?«

Housing First. What’s Second? Greece is staying on the agenda – (c) dia-eu

Homelessness in a Europe marked by crisis is an increasing phenomenon. Still, maybe the question is allowed if a program from very different national background is fitting for different European situation. This would be a more fundamental question than the question asked by the conference. Is a program relying heavily on consumer choice and self-determination ideas working for example in a still existing social welfare system as for example in Germany? One of the keynote speakers in the plenary session, Volker Busch-Geertsema, was stressing a positive answer to this basic question anyway, promoting his own research project funded by the Directorate General Employment, Social Affairs and Inclusion of the European Commission. It is called Housing First Europe and provides interesting examples of good-working Housing First Projects (www.housingfirsteurope.eu). Unfortunately, up until now there seems to be only data from Budapest (kind of), Copenhagen, Glasgow and Lisbon. Would the results be equally good if one tries the Housing First approach, say, in Berlin?

One of the issues discussed in detail was the question of evictions due to rent arrears. A comparative analysis of evictions in 14 countries (Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Germany, Denmark, Spain, Finland, France, Ireland, The Netherlands, Poland, Portugal Sweden and United Kingdom) made it clear that more research on a European level is needed. The researcher, Susanne Gerull, estimated the number of homeless people in Germany to be comparatively low due to strong legal protection of tenants in the discussion. The question remained how viable those estimations/numbers are as there are different legal systems, different definitions of homelessness and different (national) statistical offices working very differently. Maybe an improvement of this situation would be to include homelessness in the poverty indicators set up by the European Parliament and to have statistics by Eurostat on the question of homelessness European-wide (feantsaresearch.org).