A house is more than a bed – Homeless shelters in Italy
Next to my favourite bookshop in Turin, in the northwest of Italy, there is always an extremely long queue no matter the day, time or season. With tired faces, cracked lips, visible eyebags and worn-out clothes, people queue from the early afternoon for a place to sleep. Homelessness in Italy is a major challenge, and even the local infrastructure that should occasionally provide homeless people with a roof over their heads brings its own issues.
Homeless people in the city centre of Turin. Photo taken by Paola Liberati in March 2022.
Homelessness in Italy
The exact number of people without a stable home in Italy is unclear. Statistics range from 50.000, to the overwhelming number of 500.000, within a population of 60 million inhabitants. As a result, every year, tens or even hundreds of people die from hypothermia.
It is one of the highest numbers in Europe. France, for instance, has approximately 300,000 homeless people and Germany 237,000. When it comes to the average number per citizen, Luxembourg and Greece are at the top, with 37.5 and 37.1 homeless people per 10,000 inhabitants respectively. In Italy, the situation was deeply exacerbated by the 2008 economic crisis, and the Covid-19 pandemic can only be expected to further deteriorate it.
Officially, the government and the church – who still wield massive power in the country – have created several homeless shelters to provide care and relief for the homeless, who are often invisible to the wider population. To investigate whether these shelters are really helping people and what could be done differently, I visited a few of them and spoke to people who rely on them. I found a lot of solidarity and tight-knit communities, but also discovered long-standing issues.
A homeless man in Turin covered in blankets. Photo taken by Paola Liberati in March 2022.
Trading time for a bed
In homeless shelters, overcrowding and lack of an adequate number of beds is the first problem that people usually run into. In Turin, the number of homeless people is estimated to be around 1700, while the beds in dormitories or shelters less than 400 - that’s only one bed for every fourth homeless person. Before the Covid-19 pandemic, this created overly long queues, with people lining up for a spot as early as 4pm. This meant that securing a spot was almost a part-time job, resulting in the impossibility to carry out any other activity, from education and work to leisure activities. Sadly, queuing does not always even guarantee a spot. One person could queue all afternoon and then be rejected. Somebody is always left out.
I had several conversations with homeless people outside of shelters. On a late evening, one of them, with jeans and a thick, worn-out jumper, stopped to ask me for a cigarette with a thick accent, and we ended up talking for about one hour. He immediately told me that he was a street vendor, emphasising the fact that he worked hard every day. When I asked him about the situation in shelters, he described the frustrating and time-consuming struggle of queuing for a spot. He says: “I have slept in homeless shelters, sometimes. The beds are nice. Sometimes it is warm. You do not have to sleep with an eye half open to anxiously check on your belongings, although people also steal inside the shelters. But it’s too much of a hustle; to secure a spot, I have to queue all afternoon. It’s exhausting, I need to work, or I want to meet up with my friends in the park to drink something. The time spent in line is simply not worth it for me.” In addition, in many shelters guests can only stay for a limited period, usually a maximum of two weeks, and afterwards cannot go back for at least two years. As an inevitable consequence, they end up on the streets, where temperatures fall below zero in winter.
With Covid-19 the situation has slightly changed as some shelters now allow homeless people to stay for a prolonged amount of time, simultaneously reducing the possibility for people who did not secure a spot to find one in the following days. Therefore, they usually do not even try. Social worker Gaia has observed homeless people in Turin as a very tight-knit group in which useful information is exchanged: “they know each other, they would not try to secure a bed if they knew it was absolutely impossible”. However, this means that those sleeping on the streets have little chances of finding a bed.
A homeless man in Turin. Photo taken by Paola Liberati in March 2022.
A not-so-subtle story of discrimination
People without a stable home do not enjoy a good reputation among the homeless. In Italian, they are often called with the derogatory term ‘barboni’, which means people with long beards. The situation is particularly difficult for foreigners, who also have to deal with racial discrimination. Some shelters, like the Bartolomeo & C.: Dormitorio il Bivacco in Turin, have ‘Italians only’ as a requirement. Gaia, who works in another shelter, explained: “racial discrimination is the main problem that we have. People from the same countries create groups or gangs that intervene during arguments and risk escalating them into huge fights”. On the workers’ side, however, she insisted that there was absolutely no judgement or discrimination. Still, Italian citizens often feel more entitled to a bed than foreigners, and have the advantage of speaking the language.
On top of this, many shelters require specific criteria, documents or residence permits, which many homeless people, particularly migrants, often do not have. People who enter the country, some illegally, with little money, often struggle to find a job and end up on the streets. And because they lack of the correct papers, they cannot even make use of a shelter.
Alessandra, a volunteer in several shelters in Turin, sees them as a particularly difficult place for queer people: “shelters are gendered, there are those for men and those for women. Only one shelter in the entire city offers one or two beds for non-binary people”.
Luca, a volunteer worker for the Community of Saint Egidio in Rome, stressed the importance of recognising and fighting discrimination, as it often spills over. He reported that the majority of homeless people he works with are not Italian. When they lose their job or house, their family, who usually lives abroad, cannot help them. Some of them, he added, are too proud to ask for help and simply do not consider shelters as an option. They are completely on their own. In fact, Luca said: “Most of them share the same story: they lose their job, then lose their house, they have to start sleeping on the streets and begin drinking because it’s too cold.”
Substance abuse against cold and loneliness
Out on the street, many homeless people consume drugs like methadone or large quantities of alcohol to try to keep out the cold creeping into their bones, and perhaps also loneliness. Luca described the worrying conditions of homeless people abusing substances: “they drink a lot, especially in winter, to warm themselves a bit.” Thus, a shelter can save them from substance abuse and addiction. Alessandra told me that where she worked homeless people had to fulfil specific criteria, such as respecting entrance and exit times and not having any addictions. “Usually,” she said, “they start abusing substances because they are homeless, and not the other way around”.
However, Gaia explained that the shelters have a controversial approach towards substances, and often prefer to turn a blind eye rather than to deal with the situation. “Workers in shelters cannot check the belongings of those who enter, probably some of them take alcohol and drugs inside”. A homeless person I interviewed, who asked to remain anonymous, told me in pain: “I want to quit with drugs, but if I will sleep on the streets tonight I will have to take methadone. It’s the shelters’ fault for not having enough beds.”
In Italian: “illicit uses” means “just dishwashing”. Photo taken by Gaia, volunteer worker whom I interviewed, in 2021.
Beds are not houses
Regarding the conditions in the shelters where she worked, Alessandra finds that they are only a temporary remedy to the streets, as they still make people feel homeless. In fact, she described one of the shelters as made up simply of containers, with six people sleeping in each and no toilets, heating or proper ventilation system. She criticised the government for not thinking of the shelters as more than beds, and was outraged by the lack of toilets and proper meals: “It is us volunteers who provide the meals”. She also stressed the mishandling of the pandemic: “during the pandemic, no sanitary rules were respected”. Additionally, she criticised the lack of psychological help for those who sleep in shelters, since “the psycho-physic conditions of those who sleep here are precarious and they don’t receive any professional help”.
When I asked her what the government could do differently, she replied that it should create policies not based on mere welfarism, so simply providing places to sleep, eat and wash oneself, but rather create places of social aggregation, rooted in the will to reintegrate homeless people in the wider society and with help for each specific needs, like substance abuse or psychological help. “A house is more than just beds in a room. Co-housing would definitely be an option, as many of these people have difficult pasts and suffer from depression. If you met them on the street, however, some of them you wouldn't guess are homeless. The concept and image of homeless people needs to change, they are ordinary people with difficult backgrounds”.
Indeed, people often either look down too much on homeless people or pretend not to see them at all. The government should create long-term solutions for these people. As it says in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: adequate housing is a human right, not a mere commodity