For as long as anyone can remember, Europe’s great cities have tolerated–even cherished-their derelicts. Generations of French writers and lyricists, for example, have dedicated folk songs and popular novels to the clochards of Paris. But today the affection is waning. From Milan to Manchester, homelessness has grown into a problem too big to romanticize. Drug addicts, immigrants, former psychiatric patients, unemployed youths, abandoned senior citizens and an emerging class of new poor have all joined the colorful dropouts of the past. " In the not-too-distant future, we’re going to have conditions like in America," warns Uwe Friebe, a German social worker. " We’re not that far from it."
Is he exaggerating.? No one can tell for sure; enumerating the homeless in any country is like guessing the number of planets in a remote galaxy. Still, the best figures available suggest that Friebe may not be far off the mark. The National Coalition for the Homeless says 3 million Americans have no permanent shelter. That’s as many homeless as there are in the European Community (population: 347 million), says the Brussels-based European Federation of National Organizations Working with the Homeless. Both figures may be inflated. But whatever the real numbers may be, to stroll through almost any Western European city is to arrive at the same conclusion: there are more people who seem to have no place to live today than there were just a few years ago.
Social workers offer numerous explanations. In many countries, a trend away from committing the mentally ill has given rise to a new category of patients: those considered too well to be kept in hospitals, yet too disturbed to take care of themselves. At the same time, a shift in social attitudes has ended much of the ad hoe assistance that families and neighbors used to provide. Eroding family structures exacerbate the situation. The children of broken homes, often lacking supervision, are easy prey for drug merchants. The deeper their addiction to drugs, the less employable they become. The less they work, the weaker their claim to permanent housing. Antonio Nunes, a 23-year-old Frenchman of Portuguese origin, spent his teenage years in an orphanage after his parents’ divorce. At 18 he left the children’s home, and ever since then, he says, his life has consisted of odd jobs, petty theft, panhandling, amphetamine popping-and nights spent in shelters and dark alleyways.
Many among Europe’s new homeless have incomes that put them well above the poverty line. “Homelessness now reaches into the bourgeois class,” says Jochen Meurers, a street worker in Frankfurt. Why does someone like Manfred end up in the streets? Across Western Europe during the 1980s, governments scaled back investment in public housing. Faced with what was then a housing glut, the private construction industry slowed new starts at around the same time. But since then the fall of communism led hundreds of thousands of Eastern Europeans to migrate to the West, intensifying the competition for living space. Already there are almost twice as many immigrants as Italians sleeping in the streets of Rome, says Mario Marazzitti of the Sant’Edigio Community, a Roman Catholic charity.
While most immigrants find temporary lodgings, for now few can hope to move into apartments of their own. Back in Albania, Ramadan and Sabina Mati saw visions of nirvana on Italian television. Now they live in a Rome shelter with their two sons. " It’s a thousand times better than in Albania," says Sabina. " But good God, it isn’t like in the commercials we saw."
Local governments are slowly waking up to the widening problem. But the bulk of services for the homeless is still delivered by private groups. They may have been able to address the needs of Europe’s traditional vagrants-but they cannot begin to cope with the new waves of homelessness. " The state is dumping its responsibilities on volunteers," complains Msgr. Luigi di Liegro, Rome branch director of the relief organization Caritas. That’s unlikely to change as long as Western Europe keeps cutting back at the edges of its social-welfare network.
