Tackling homelessness needs much more than promises and policies

While homelessness generates statistics and strategies around the world, Jane Cacouris asks what really is home.

Jane Cacouris

Jane Cacouris is a writer and consultant working in international development on environment, poverty and livelihood issues.

A mother sits with a toddler standing in front of her. The father appears from the side lying on his back reaching an arm out.

A family play in a Rio favela.

“Mummy, are we homeless?” asked our six-year-old as we pulled away in the taxi. We had just eaten a final meal - a KFC family bucket of fried chicken - sitting on a sarong on the floor of our empty apartment in Rio de Janeiro, our home for almost four years.

The question left me momentarily winded. Homeless. A word that instantly conjured up feelings of anxiety and uncertainty, of sands shifting under our feet. Technically, yes, we were. My husband had just left his job in Brazil, and we had two months with nowhere to live before we relocated back to the UK. With no permanent base anywhere in the world, we were about to use the time to travel in South America as a family. Whilst I did feel somewhat insecure, my husband in contrast found it freeing; the first time in his life that he didn’t carry a set of house keys in his pocket. We had nowhere to live, but we were free to go wherever we wanted. And this is where the analogy of us actually being homeless broke down. We had a freedom of choice in a way that the vast majority of people who experience homelessness do not.

World Homeless Day on the 10th October was marked with the recent release of a landmark UN report on global homelessness. The UN define homelessness as:

“where a person or household lacks habitable space with security of tenure, rights, and ability to enjoy social relations, including safety. [It] is a manifestation of extreme poverty and a failure of multiple systems and human rights.”

According to UN-Habitat, a staggering 1.6 billion people in the world are estimated to be in inadequate housing and over 150 million have no housing at all.

Global homelessness has been rising for the past decade, with temporary homelessness being increasingly caused by conflict and climate-induced displacement. However, according to the UN report, Covid-19 exacerbated the issue, deepening existing inequalities and causing already marginalised people to be even more vulnerable.

In developing countries, the informal economy – self-made microentrepreneurs who sell everything from popcorn to shoe polishing - usually sustains the poor urban majority. But with many informal jobs vanishing during lockdowns, and with few assets and limited social safety nets, many urban dwellers were rapidly plunged further into poverty. Women and children suffering from domestic and gender-based violence had to remain in unsafe environments, with abuse escalating during lockdowns and curfews. Issues that encouraged migration and homelessness.

There are approximately 150 million children living and working on the streets worldwide. Almost impossible to imagine, and so the number sometimes doesn’t compute with our hearts.

The extent of homelessness worldwide is notoriously difficult to quantify accurately, partly due to what is known as hidden homelessness. The hidden and isolated nature of children and adolescents living on the street, for example, makes statistics difficult to gather. A 2023 UNICEF report of street children in Dhaka estimated that the number of children living on the street just in Bangladesh could be in the millions. And according to UN sources there are approximately 150 million children living and working on the streets worldwide. Almost impossible to imagine, and so the number sometimes doesn’t compute with our hearts. The true horror of the isolation of child homelessness only truly hit me a few years ago…

The residents in our block had finally had enough of the noise and called the police. They arrived in the middle of the night with their guns and shot at the children who dispersed.

Living at the top of a high-rise block in the middle of an urban neighbourhood in Rio, we were kept awake for a number of nights in a row. It started as a disturbance – children yelling in the street outside that would continue from the early hours until dawn. But as the days went on, the disturbance at night became more acute. One morning as I stepped out of our apartment in the morning, bleary-eyed and irritated, I was confronted by a small group of sleeping children lying huddled together in a row on the pavement next to a tree. Several pairs of bare filthy feet were sticking out of a blanket they were sharing. I looked down at them as I passed – they varied in age from about eight to twelve years old. The youngest was probably younger than my son at the time. He had knotted black curly hair and a streaked face. The next night we heard gun shots and then an eery silence. Another sleepless night, this time from worrying about the children, and then we discovered that the residents in our block had finally had enough of the noise and called the police. They arrived in the middle of the night with their guns and shot at the children who dispersed. The children never came back.

The government pledge to end rough sleeping in England by the end of 2024 is woefully off track.

Although homelessness is an overwhelmingly larger problem in poor countries, it also affects affluent nations, including the United Kingdom. This year the Kerslake Commission, an expert panel set up to scrutinise how rough sleeping is being addressed across England, pointed out that data on rough sleeping in London last year showed a 16 per cent increase in numbers of people sleeping rough. And that almost half (48 per cent) were sleeping rough for the first time. It concluded that the government pledge to end rough sleeping in England by the end of 2024 is woefully off track. According to Crisis, the homelessness system in England is at breaking point and the Homelessness Monitor 2023 reported that the cost-of-living crisis, rising rents and a lack of affordable housing are making it harder for councils to provide homeless people with effective support.

It is about where you feel valued and understood… where you feel loved… and where you want to come back to.

So, the problem of homelessness really is global. And what is the answer? Yes, governments must act; social safety nets and public policies to help alleviate poverty are critical. But even the richest countries with the most advanced governments have never been able to fully tackle this issue. Homelessness and poverty were rife in Biblical times. As Jesus said in the Gospel of John, “‘You will always have the poor with you”. And Jesus himself understands homelessness in a way many of us don’t; he started life in a stable, born to parents who were sleeping rough. He became a baby on the run to flee King Herod, homeless and seeking asylum in Egypt. When Jesus was older, after he was baptised by John the Baptist, he became homeless again, living life on the the road and in the open. In Luke, he says: “Foxes have dens and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.”

He emphasised that his followers leave the trappings of “home” to follow him.

I used to volunteer at a Christian charity, Casa de Maria e Marta, in a favela (slum) community in Rio, known for gang violence and drug trafficking. A larger-than-life Brazilian lady, Edimea, has run the charity for over twenty years. Almost a hundred children come to the charity each day, which provides three meals as well as extra tuition and care for the children. All of those who attend are either living in inadequate housing or are homeless. One day I asked Edimea whether she still sees the children after they leave her charity at age twelve. She laughed and said yes of course, they still come back to eat! And then she said,

“I do an assessment before I take a new child in, to understand what they know, and work out how we can best help them. And I always say to them – we take beautiful children, and so we are taking you, because you are beautiful inside and out. They come back because they don’t forget those words.”

Like Jesus, Edimea shows endless concern and love for those on the margins. She can’t solve all the practical problems she comes across or offer a permanent roof over a head, but she does provide a place where everyone feels a sense of safety and belonging. Perhaps home means more than the UN’s definition. It is about where you feel valued and understood… where you feel loved… and where you want to come back to.

Column

Change

Death & life

12 May 2023

6 min read

The really annoying thing about dying

In his first Notes from Solitude, the death of his dad causes Roger Bretherton to reflect on the relationship and the strange emergence of 'father’.

Roger Bretherton

Roger is a Clinical and Coaching Psychologist.

A pocket watch rests next to a black and white photograph of a father lying beside a new born baby.

Photo by Anne Nygård on Unsplash.

The death of my dad was sudden and unexpected. I don’t know why it is that, from the moment he died, I have had to fight the almost irresistible urge to refer to him as father- a term of address I never used about him or to him during his life.

Perhaps in some psychotherapy session at some point my therapist referred to my ‘father’, and I may have followed suit. And maybe occasionally when socialising with those who seemed a cut above my largely lower-middle class background, I called him father so as to avoid the flat northern vowel sounds that would expose me as an interloper. But that was just to fit in- on all other occasions he was decidedly not father and definitely just good old plain, dad.

At death he became a classic, a museum piece, a part of history, not the dad who taught me how to ride a bike.

But for some reason the moment he died, it felt like dad wasn’t enough. I now had to call him father - those were the rules. At death he became a classic, a museum piece, a part of history, not the dad who taught me how to ride a bike by panting and sweating my five-year old self round the block, but the father who taught me to be… a man, or something like that.

The F-word has gravitas, presence, authority. Dads are human, often bewildered, occasionally pissed off, eminently huggable, easily taken for granted - just there. Admittedly, Freud would have lost significant gravitas if oedipal theory had considered common-all-garden dads and not cigar-smoking brandy-swilling fathers. And no doubt the climactic scene of The Empire Strikes Back would have lacked considerable pathos had Darth Vader casually quipped, ‘No Luke, I’m your’re Dad’.

The curse of the martyr, write Albert Camus, was to have other people tell their story. The principle doesn’t just apply to martyrs, it’s true of all those who die. To be dead is to become a character in other people’s anecdotes. That’s the really annoying thing about dying, we become a topic of gossip, people get to talk about us without the courtesy of ever having to talk to us. We become object, no longer subject. I think that’s why I resist calling my late Dad, Father. It objectifies him, makes of him something that he wasn’t. It, most definitely fails to do justice to all that he meant to me.

She simply said, ‘It’s your Dad’, and held me tight in a hug that lasted longer than usually permitted in polite company.

I say he died suddenly. It was a Sunday morning. I was in church at the time. Actually, worse than that, I was on stage speaking to a church. As a psychologist working in academia, I teach and train all kinds of people in every kind of organisation imaginable, but every now and then I get to speak in churches.

On this occasion I was talking about character, the positive qualities of being – like love, gratitude, hope, wisdom and so on – that make life worth living. When I stepped off the stage my wife was waving to me from the back of the room, which was weird given that we don’t go to that church and she hadn’t come with me. When I wandered to the back of the auditorium wearing my ‘what are you doing here?’ face, she simply said, ‘It’s your Dad’, and held me tight in a hug that lasted longer than usually permitted in polite company. For someone who prides himself on social insight, it shames me to say that it took a while for the penny to drop. We were in the car with the engine running before it finally dawned on me what she meant.

I try not to make too much of divine timings or fate, but there was something odd in the timing of getting that news. In that month I had addressed church congregations three Sundays in a row- which, as someone who is generally lazy and prefers not to work weekends, is an unusually intense frequency. But over three successive Sundays I had reflected aloud with those congregations that there were prayers that had accompanied the various stages of my life. Prayers that I found myself praying, almost as if they were prayed through me, as if they had chosen me rather than I they.

In my twenties I had found myself praying as regularly as a heartbeat, ‘God do whatever you need to do with me, to make me into the person you would like me to be.’ It was a radical invitation for God to put me through whatever was needed to become who I was meant to be. But then the prayer faded. Its visit was over, it had done its work and it moved on. But as I addressed the congregations on those three Sundays I mused aloud that while the prayer of my twenties had departed decades before, I found a new prayer stirring in my forties. Now as the father of teenage boys, my new prayer was, ‘God do whatever you need to do with me to make me the father you would like me to be.’

In the weeks that followed, people asked me whether I had had a good relationship with my dad. The most accurately answer was: we had the best relationship of which we were both capable. We both tried in our own ways to deepen our connection, but we were like the lovers in a romantic comedy; we always managed to miss each other. When he tried with me, I didn’t want to know. For several years, he left a book lying around at home that he wanted me to read. I never saw anyone touch it, but it moved around the house under its own steam. It was by my bedside, in the toilet, on the dining room table… Macavity the Mystery Cat would have been proud. It was called, Things We Wish We Had Said. We may have wished, but we didn’t say. I never read it. Years later, when I tried with him, he was too flustered to respond. Both of us in our own ways lacked the courage to connect any deeper. But I was never in any doubt that he loved me, and I him.

When he was alive I was most aware of how different we were. I defined myself in opposition to whatever he was. If he was gentle, I was assertive. If he was indecisive, I was ambitious.

He died of a heart attack on a Sunday morning asleep in bed, while my Mum was at church. Almost immediately his absence prompted a profound change of consciousness in me. When he was alive I was most aware of how different we were. I defined myself in opposition to whatever he was. If he was gentle, I was assertive. If he was indecisive, I was ambitious. If he was inexpressive, I was articulate. If he was like that, I was like this. And yet, almost at the very moment of his death, a reversal of awareness occurred. I started to see just how very much like him I was. His gentleness, his uncertainty, his scepticism, his care, his humour, were all mine.

There is a rule in family therapy, that adult children relating to their parents should set their expectations to zero. We never truly see our parents until we stop viewing them through the lens of our own desires; what we wanted from them but never got. Until we do that our lives don’t really work, we sit around waiting for an impossible transformation, a payday that never comes, the moment our parents become exactly how we would like them to be, not as they are. For me, that moment of acceptance for dad only came when he was gone, I accepted him as he was when there was nothing left to accept. I don’t write this with any great sense of guilt or regret at opportunities lost, more with a sense of gratitude for what was given but often taken for granted.

Oddly though, in the shadow of that seismic shift in my interior furniture, I detected the stirrings of an answer to my own prayer to be a better father. No longer compelled to define myself in contrast to what he was, I was freed to be what I was- both like and unlike him, and to be fair, more like him than I cared to admit. At some visceral level I came to appreciate how much of myself originated with him. I came to accept myself as a dad and my dad as a father.