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.

Article

Books

Change

Mental Health

17 June 2024

5 min read

Reading together helps us read our own lives better

The rush and tumble nearly squeezes the life out of the clock’s second hand.

Jessica Brown

Jessica is a researcher, writer, and singer-songwriter. She is studying at Trinity College Dublin, and is an ordinand with the Church of Ireland.

A painting shows two 19th century women in a carriage, one reading as the others snoozes.

The Travelling Companions, Augustus Egg.

Birmingham Museums Trust on Unsplash.

Even ordinary days seem to have frantic edges. A friend of mine, a salesman and father of four teenagers, said the other day that it felt like he was the hamster in the wheel, but so dreadfully exhausted, he’s flopped over, thumping around as the wheel keeps spinning. If we put a finger on the pulse of our current cultural desires, one pulse would be the longing not only for rest — spots of digital fasting or a day hiking — but an overhaul and renewal of what we’ve done with time. Yet it is difficult to know how to slow down, and it often seems that our attempts for self-care and being intentional are not enough to register that desired sense of slowness.

If we managed this, we would not just be able to slow down, but we would figure out how to bring our experience — the texture, the feel — of our paced lives into something like healing. The rush and tumble of a normal day nearly squeezes the life out of the clock’s second hand, and far too often, most of us reach each evening in some state of exhaustion.

Speaking from my own story, a shift happened when we moved from Los Angeles (which was, to be fair, a great place for us until it wasn’t) to East Clare in the Midlands of Ireland. It was a shift that my whole being needed—needed at a limbic and somatic level, in the spiritual self, as an artist, for family dynamics, and for my partner, a sense of freedom in work. It wasn’t that we merely got more time in our day: it was that our immersion in time, our soul’s experience of the clock, found an ‘easing up’ that — though the daily round is still arduous enough — afforded a little more time in every direction to breathe, think, walk, write; be.

It’s been in the wake of this move, nearly eight years ago now, that I’ve pondered why it felt that the hills here gathered me up into their arms and helped me to actually slow down. Is it these hills, the lovely stretches of variant greens and the countless walking paths hidden among them? Is it the congregation of artists — local artists, who refashioned my ideas about artistic success, inculcated as I was into seeing it as only with a large following? Is it the deliberate decisions to keep family overheads as low as we can, freeing up a bit of time from the understandable and ongoing need for wages?

Among the many reasons for the shift in how I experience time — for the sense, not just of slowing down, but of time affording more space — is the grace of reading with others.

The pastor, physician, and poet—this trio of us still are surprised by the deep, serendipitous connections that our poems make, week after week.

In fact, before this shift there was the keenly disappointing realisation of how little time in the land of adulthood could be set aside for reading. In the last few years, though, the regular habit of reading in companionship has grown into one of the most structural elements of my week. With Monday evening comes lectio divina, an ancient Christian practice for reading scripture in an authentically ‘listening’ way. Two lovely pals from town and I meet (often over a WhatsApp call, but sometimes in person) to read together a passage from the Bible, usually what will be read at a service the following Sunday.

On Monday night, my brother in Texas and I unpack whatever book we’re reading at the moment. We started with Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, went onto Michael Foley’s School of Life book on Henri Bergson, and after a few more texts, are now reading the stunning poetry collection The Art of the Lathe by the Texan-Kansan poet B.H. Fairchild.

On Tuesday nights, I gather via Zoom with two other women—a minister in Connecticut and a doctor in Sydney; we met at an online course about Rilke in the winter of 2021, and still meet regularly, each bringing a poem to share and the stories of our lives as we’re living through the week. The pastor, physician, and poet—this trio of us still is surprised by the deep, serendipitous connections that our poems make, week after week.

I think too what happens in this reading companionship is that the muscles we use to attend to words together are the very muscles needed to read our own lives.

As these fellow readers and I weave together silence and articulation, listening and exploration, our time together edges eternity. In this, I think I glimpse how God works to redeem the violence we do to time. When we enter into the invitation to holy spaces—like time spent with the Bible, times in prayer, times of friendship—our usage of clock time becomes secondary to the content within that duration, and certainly secondary to the presence of others (be it the writer of the Gospel of John, Emily Dickinson, the Holy Spirit, or a friend down the road). Our experience of time becomes inflected by the psychological richness and the interplay of spiritual growth with another person or persons.

I think too what happens in this reading companionship is that the muscles we use to attend to words together are the very muscles needed to read our own lives. In this, we can suss out how the longing for slowness is an appropriate one and one to listen to. Using metaphors at hand, reading our lives with the modalities of dialogue, listening, and in-time discovery means that our longing for slowness can help us see that we’re looking for a waypoint, a stop along the road; or a few days at basecamp, patching up and cleaning worn gear; or a longer stretch of wintering in the plains before crossing the mountains; or a period of convalescence in a home by the sea. These images for rest, for pause and restoration, can help us see how to open to God’s care in our living narratives, care that seeks to renew and redeem our often grueling experience of time.

The special grace that reading companionship yields is not just the hour’s content that is spent in shared conversation, though this is nourishing and transformative in its own right. It is how this hour sets the context for all the other hours. The humble stance of reading with attention and cherishing the voices of others models a kind of immersed slowness for the rest of our personhood. At the end of the day, I think it’s a radical counterpoint to what we often ask of a day, an infusion of divine grace into the pumping vessels of time.