Contents
- The visibility of homelessness and the transformation of public space
- Who is a homeless person?
- Myths surrounding affordable housing and homelessness
- Racism in New York and targeted social exclusion
- 2050 – a world without homeless people
Introduction
These days, we see homeless people as an everyday feature of the street. Their numbers are increasing, paradoxically in wealthier cities especially. Whether we are walking through Prague or New York, the situation is the same, the only difference being the number of people in dire straits and the system in which they find themselves.
Economically strong cities have the potential to offer various forms of affordable housing. However, with their current focus on individualism and their naive faith in the self-sustainability of the free market and concentrated capital, if anything they are exacerbating the housing crisis and the growth of social problems. The housing market has recently been transformed to such an extent that it is gradually becoming unaffordable for the majority of urban dwellers, who are being pushed out of centres and into the periphery. At the same time, this problem will affect an increasing number of people due to the climate crisis and the ensuing migration.
The phenomenon of entire families and workers being homeless is on the rise, and the number of people who, despite working hard, are unable to deal with the basic cost of living, is on the up and up.
When looking at the reasons why someone has nowhere to sleep, we inevitably start to ask ourselves some pressing questions. What are our values? What relationship do we have to the weakest members of society? How is this manifest in the public space? What effect does the environment have on people? How many segregated areas and people in social exclusion do we have? Are we racist? What is our attitude to housing – is it a human right or must it be earned? Does our society create homeless people on its own?
These are people that we don’t perceive as being part of society. For us they are an image of failure in life. The question is to what extent this is by choice or through their own fault.
Homelessness should be seen as a political problem embodying the (dys)functionality of the housing system. The fact is that the inaccessibility of housing is first and foremost a political decision, e.g. to privatise the housing stock. The prevailing rhetoric around individual responsibility is intended to divert attention away from the politicians and governments responsible for the situation. For the most part, they delegate the duty of cities to provide public or minimally affordable housing for all, including low-income residents, to the private sector. However, cities are unable to force developers to meet this need. And yet low-income workers provide a range of indispensible services without which cities would collapse.
In this exhibition, we look at homelessness and the housing crisis through four thematic domains that draw on both the Czech (European) and New York (US) context. A deeper understanding of the situation in New York offers us the opportunity to understand the broader context of the social issue and thus correct the course of developments here in Europe:
- The visibility of homelessness in public space
- Who is a homeless person?
- Myths surrounding affordable housing and homelessness
- Racism in New York and targeted social exclusion
The fifth and final section of the exhibition offers two paths: where things will lead if we continue to persuade ourselves that the housing crisis and homelessness are not our problem; and where things will lead if we accept that it is our problem, thus sparking a social discussion and action leading to change.
The exhibition Whose Problem Is It? is a collaboration between the architect Karolína Kripnerová and the artist Janek Rous. Both have long been interested in social issues such as unaffordable housing, exclusion and homelessness, from the perspective of both architecture and contemporary art.
The initial impulse for the exhibition came from Karolína Kripnerová’s research visit to New York, which took place in spring 2023 thanks to a Fulbright scholarship at Community Solutions, thus expanding the theme to include the American context.
Karolína Kripnerová is an architect specialising in the social overlap of architecture. She gives lectures, writes articles and facilitates discussions on how architects can contribute to resolving homelessness, affordable housing and the public space. She graduated from the Faculty of Architecture of the Czech Technical University (ČVUT), where she subsequently defended her dissertation. At present she teaches there. She is a co-founder of the non-profit organisation Architects Without Borders and works in her own Kazimour Kripnerová architectural studio.
Janek Rous is an audiovisual artist and lecturer at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. He specialises in the medium of the moving image and sound. The central themes of his work are social issues and the human impact on the world. He runs the contemporary art platform Artyčok.tv, where he also creates documentaries that in recent years have focused on social sustainability.
Authors: Karolína Kripnerová, Janek Rous
Collaboration: Magdalena Rutová
Acknowledgements: Jan Bárta, Ester Pacltová, Aleš Strnad, Táňa Zabloudilová, J. William Fulbrighta Commission, Community Solutions
1. The visibility of homelessness and the transformation of public space
Homelessness
Homelessness is a global and urgent problem. It is often referred to as a failure of the individual. However, one of the main reasons for the growing number of homeless people in cities is dysfunctional housing systems. Paradoxically, the numbers of homeless people are rising especially in the wealthiest cities.
More: Leilani Farha talk for Who’s Next exhibition
Push - a film about what’s causing the global housing crisis
Leilani Farha – text Who’s Next
Hostile architecture
The desire to “remove” homeless people from the view of passers-by leads to the installation of various repressive trappings in public space. Collectively, these are so-called hostile architecture – spikes, spikes and spikes, or “improvements” to benches – partitions or other traps that prevent people from lying down on them. Or benches disappear from public space altogether. But such measures affect the whole of society – even the elderly cannot sit down. The spikes stop everyone.
More: Nepřátelská architektura necílí jen na bezdomovce v Praze. Nutí utrácet i tebe (Refresher, 2022)
Když lidé bez domova nejsou vítáni. Nepřátelská architektura problém neřeší, jen odsouvá z dohledu (Radio Wave, 2023)
‘Hostile Architecture’: How Public Spaces Keep the Public Out (New York Times, 2019)
Situation in New York
In New York City, homelessness became the most visible problem, particularly in the 1980s, when the American economy underwent structural changes and support for low-income residents diminished. At the same time, large mental hospitals were disbanded without replacement and crack cocaine, a readily available drug, became widespread. The shock of visible homelessness prompted a congressional response that enacted housing and social service programs that continue to operate today.
At the time, New York City introduced the “Right to Shelter”, unique in the United States, which guarantees anyone who applies a same-day bed in the system of dormitories and shelters. This right, however, is fraught with controversy: on the one hand, everyone has at least a roof over their heads, on the other hand, the city invests a large amount of money in a system that keeps people homeless, albeit in a different form. The same amount of money could bring permanent housing to many of them.
The right to shelter began to be in jeopardy at the end of 2023 after more than 40 years of operation, because the city cannot respond in capacity to the never-ending waves of migrants from Central and South America.
Homelessness in New York City is closely linked to racism. Dark-skinned people (blacks and Hispanics) are the majority of the city's poorer residents. They rarely own property that would allow them to take out loans to support their children's education, for example. The fact that education in the United States is fee-based makes it unaffordable for these people.
More: History of Homelessness in New York (OpenLab)
Save the Right to Shelter (Coalition for the homeless)
Situation in Prague
In Prague and in the Czech Republic in general, homeless people began to be visible with the change of regime after 1989, when the phenomenon of poverty and homelessness emerged after fifty years of “invisibility”. At the beginning of the 1990s, a number of corporate hostels were dissolved and at the same time the work obligations that had been legislated until then were abolished.
At first, compassion for the weak resonated in society. Many organisations (for example, Naděje – Hope and the Czech branch of the Salvation Army) were set up, along with a network of places where they provide help. A system of social services also took root. Although society now tends to be rather uninterested in the homeless because they are “on their own”, a relatively large network of solidarity and support organisations offers hope for change.
More: Příběhy 20. století – Bezdomovci (Česká televize, 2019)
Lack of public space facilities
The space between houses can also become hostile by lacking something. For example, there is nowhere to go to the toilet – which can be a problem not only for homeless people, but for everyone. The capital is now considering what strategy to adopt in relation to public toilets: whether they should be “free and accessible” or, on the contrary, chargeable or not at all.
We can profitably take inspiration from New York, where there are free public toilets in every park. The city is then welcoming to its residents and visitors.
And what else could be missing? Showers, for example. Again, they would be appreciated by hikers and cyclists, for example. And by homeless people for sure, because today the capacity is about 200 people per shower, so if these people wanted to wash up, the option is very limited. Architects Without Borders and Místní místním (Local to Local) have prepared an analysis of the friendliness of public space in Prague.
More: Veřejný prostor v Praze - chybějící infrastruktura a nástrahy (Architekti bez hranic a Místní místním, 2021)
Sprchomat – concept of public showers (Architekti bez hranic, 2017)
2. Who is a homeless person?
How many homeless people are there in the world?
There is no single definition for homeless people, hence there are different numbers on how many people are actually in this situation. According to UN figures from 2015, 1.6 trillion people live in inadequate housing.
How many homeless people are there in New York City and the U.S.?
In the entire United States, official figures give 580,000 homeless people, but educated guesses speak of as many as 3.5 million. The largest totals were in New York State and California; the two metropolitan areas of New York City and Los Angeles have similar numbers of homeless people, but in New York City most are “hidden” behind the walls of dormitories and shelters. In contrast, in Los Angeles, support services are completely absent, and so most people are on the streets.
More: State of Homelessness: 2023 Edition
And how many people are homeless in the Czech Republic and the EU?
In the Czech Republic, according to available data, 12,000 people are without a roof, which is the most severe form of homelessness. These people are living on the streets or sleeping in hostels. Another 24,800 people are without housing or a flat, which means they live in shelters, hostels or institutions. However, a total of 154,000 people, including 61,000 children, are in housing need. This number of people includes the previous two groups mentioned (homeless and roofless), plus people in insecure and substandard housing. Across the European Union, there has been an increase of up to 70% in the number of homeless people over the last ten years. If we do not look to solve homelessness, the problem will get worse. That is why the European Parliament has set itself the target of ending homelessness by 2030.
More: Bydlení jako problém (Zpráva o vyloučení z bydlení, 2021)
How Parliament wants to end homelessness in the EU (Evropean Parliament, 2020)
Přehled dat – Závěrečná zpráva RIA k zákonu o podpoře v bydlení
And how much does it all cost?
Just as it is difficult to determine how many homeless people there are, it is also difficult to say how much each country needs to spend on homelessness. In general, however, all public assistance to people in need is more expensive in the long run than giving these people access to permanent housing. In the Czech Republic, this has been demonstrated, for example, by a successful pilot project to house families in Brno called Rapid Re-housing.
More: Czech context – Pilotní testování rychlého zabydlení rodin s dětmi (Rapid Re-Housing)
American context – How Much Would It Cost To End Homelessness In America?
How Parliament wants to end homelessness in the EU (Evropean Parliament, 2020)
The social services system in the United States
The U.S. system for addressing homelessness (social services and supported housing) is quite complex and lacks central coordination. The state allocates money for the provision of assistance, but delegates its implementation and responsibility for its quality and targeting to local NGOs. The system therefore varies considerably from state to state, from region to region and even from city to city.
NGOs are thus a powerful layer of actors that provide services demanded by the state. Since the 1960s, cities in the US cannot legally build housing themselves, instead allocating money to grants from which these organisations draw. But they hire for-profit companies to build the housing for them, making the whole process extremely expensive. The provision of social services has become more of a business, with providers not wanting to lose the resources of their business. The whole system is thus more about programmatically perpetuating homelessness rather than reducing or solving it.
In general, however, it declares a Housing First approach.
More: What is a Continuum of Care? (endhomelessness - 2010)
Housing First Implementation Resources
The system of social services for homeless people in the Czech Republic
In the Czech Republic, the provision of social services is managed and controlled by the state and regional branches of the Labour Office. Each social service provider has to register in the so-called regional social service network – and thus fill the proposed capacity of services. Financing is provided both by the users themselves and by subsidies from the state, regional and municipal budgets.
The Czech system of social services for homeless people is different from the American system, it is a so-called permeable housing, where people are gradually “taught” how to live. However, its success rate is only around 20%. The system has the following stages: an outreach programme establishes contact with people in need, low-threshold day centres provide basic assistance (clothing, food, hygiene), night shelters provide emergency accommodation for one night, and shelters provide accommodation for up to one year in shared rooms. This should be followed by a stay in training apartments with support. And when the “clients” pass the system, they should be allowed to enter standard housing, i.e. municipal (or social) housing, but this is still largely lacking in the Czech Republic.
Interestingly, from an architectural point of view, there are no standards or typologies for these services as to what such an asylum or dormitory should actually look like. Mostly, buildings that were not designed for this function are adapted for it.
More: Sociální bydlení v České republice (Zpráva pro Zastoupení Evropské komise v ČR, 2021)
Supported housing in New York City
The following types of supported housing are available in New York: affordable housing and public housing. Affordable housing is built and owned by private developers, partly with public money. Ironically, they tend to have high rents, making it difficult for the middle and lower income classes to afford them.
Public housing was built by city agencies mainly in the 1950s. However, the construction was of poor quality, and today they are at the end of their useful life and there is no money to repair them. Only low-income residents live there, so the houses are socially segregated areas with high crime rates.
The city is also helping to address housing unaffordability for people whose 30% of their income does not cover their rent by using vouchers – money orders that people use to help them pay for their housing costs. However, landlords are often reluctant to accept people with vouchers, for example because the city is paradoxically late in paying.
More: New York City’s Affordable Housing Programs
Supported housing in Prague
There are two types of supported housing in the Czech Republic, municipal and emerging social housing. Historically, cooperative housing can also be included here. After 1989, there was a large privatisation of the municipal housing stock and the original number of almost 200,000 flats in Prague was reduced to about 30,000 units. However, municipalities are now aware of the need for their own municipal housing stock and are again engaged in its construction. In Prague, the Prague Development Company and the Affordable Cooperative Housing project (which aims to enable the creation of new cooperatives on municipal land) have been established. Also, the City Rental Agency was created to provide housing for people in housing need on the commercial real estate market.
Although there is still no law on the necessity to build social housing, municipalities are pursuing this goal on their own initiative and resources.
The state helps to cover people's housing costs through social benefits – housing allowance and housing supplement, which are administered by the regional branch of the Labour Office.
More: Stav a vývoj obecního bytového fondu v městských částech hl. m. Prahy (2021)
Alternative housing projects – social mix
The Vienna-based charity VinziRast has come up with a pioneering concept for housing that mixes different social groups together to enable their mutual enrichment. In a multidisciplinary team, which included architects as well as future users, the concept of the so-called hybrid house was born. In addition to housing, it also offers work, counselling or even rental space. The living floors are small apartments where (formerly) homeless people and students live together. The basis is a single room, i.e. privacy for everyone.
This concept was inspired by the Czech project Symbios, which is in Brno and offers shared housing for young people from orphanages and students.
More: Architektura soužití: VinziRast-mittendrin
Symbios v Brně
Racism in the Czech Republic
Racism against the Romani minority is strongly – albeit covertly – present in the Czech Republic. It impacts both on the life opportunities of (young) people and on housing opportunities. Homelessness is not high among Roma (mainly due to the cohesion of their community), but they often fail to access standard housing and are forced to live either in overcrowded or otherwise inadequate apartments or in residential hotels.
Demythologizing societal perceptions is the goal of Tuke.TV’s successful “Dumb Questions” project.
More: Romové nemají šanci si pronajmout byt. Romská rodina nabízí pět nájmů dopředu, realitky se vymlouvají na majitele
Hloupé otázky (Tuke.TV)
Energy poverty
Other structural problems go hand in hand with housing unaffordability. In the Czech environment, for example, there is the so-called energy poverty, i.e. expensive energy prices, which mainly affect the poorest social classes. Even before the sharp increase in energy prices, almost one million people in the Czech Republic were already living in energy poverty.
More: Energetická chudoba trápí až milion občanů Česka. Poslankyně a poslanci navrhli, jak ji řešit
The business with poverty
The term means poor families living in substandard conditions. This is often the case for Roma families who cannot find any other accommodation than in residential hotels. These families pay exorbitant fees for unsuitable housing (overcrowded rooms, poor sanitary conditions, etc.), and these conditions – which are devastating to the psyche and the family – are supported by the state through social benefits. One solution to this problem could be the proposed Housing Assistance Act.
More: Od „obchodu s chudobou“ ke „krizi bydlení“. Jak se chudoba prokapala směrem nahoru (A2larm, 2023)
3. Myths surrounding affordable housing and homelessness
Unaffordable housing as a systemic problem
Homelessness is a systemic problem where the housing market does not provide enough affordable housing for low-income residents. Housing has become a market commodity and investment instead of a basic human right, and a condition for a happy life. Housing is being bought up by investors or even large investment funds, which are driving the price of real estate to unaffordable heights. They function as capital appreciation, not as a place to live. Apartments even remain empty.
More: Push – The Film
Push / Vylidněno – film ke shlédnutí on-line (platforma Promítej i ty, Jeden svět)
New forms of housing
In addition to traditional owner-occupied and rental family housing, new (or historically proven) forms of participatory housing are emerging: cohousing, baugruppe (Coop Housing in Berlin Spreefeld or Wohnprojekt in Vienna), cooperative housing, shared housing, community housing (e.g. the network of Shared Houses – Prague’s První vlaštovka) and others.
More: Co je participativní bydlení
Coop Housing in Berlin
Wohnprojekt ve Vídni
Komunitní bydlení je pro nás jediná možnost, jak bydlet v Praze stabilně a důstojně, říkají členové spolku Sdílené domy
Brožura Příběhy úspěchu Plzeň
The impact of housing unaffordability on cities
The current state of the housing market should be called a crisis, where people cannot afford to live in the city where they work. In New York, for example, there is a change in the composition of the population: young people, manual workers and minorities – especially black people – are leaving. The city is losing the diversity and variety that defines it but also makes it work.
More: Why Black Families Are Leaving New York, and What It Means for the City (The New York Times, 2023)
The Right to the City
Who is the city for and who shapes it? Can cities function without garbage collectors, street sweepers, female security guards, as well as shopkeepers and nurses? The city needs even low-wage professions to function.
More: Michaela Pixová: Kam bychom měli mířit, když požadujeme právo na město (Deník Referendum, 2018)
Václav Orcígr, Barbora Jelínková: Za spravedlivá města. Odkaz urbanisty Petra Marcuseho (A 2, 2022)
Municipal/public housing
The newly established Prague Development Company aims to implement municipal rental housing; the capital city took this step after inspiration from Vienna, Munich and Hamburg.
At the other pole is New York and its relatively large stock of council housing. The city lacks the funds for maintenance, and privatisation is one of the strategies being considered, but this means a loss of housing security for tenants.
More: Apolena Rychlíková: Vídeň: systém bydlení, který obdivuje celý svět, berou místní jako něco úplně normálního (Alarm, 2020)
The future of public housing in the U.S.
Finnish approach
The Ministry of the Environment, which is responsible for homelessness, has three basic principles of its approach listed on its website. These include the ethical obligation to provide standard living conditions for homeless people, the duty of the authorities to address homelessness and the claim that reducing homelessness also makes economic sense because it proportionally reduces public health and social care costs.
More: Finnish Ministry of the Environment – approach to tackling homelessness
Children in hostels
Housing unaffordability and racial discrimination force some families to live in hostels or dormitories. Most of them offer a poor quality environment that does not meet social standards. Children who grow up in hostels then adopt them as the norm. The system thus indirectly encourages young people to become homeless. Prague took action against this trend in the last parliamentary term, when the then coalition set a goal in its programme declaration that not a single family with children (and not a single senior citizen) would have to live in residential hotels. In the case of families with children, significant progress was made by the end of the last parliamentary term. However, the current coalition is not continuing the efforts it has started.
More: Ten nejhorší start do života, který můžou děti dostat
Who can this happen to?
If several unfortunate life events come together, paying rent can become difficult and without early help, a fall to the bottom of society can follow. Common causes of housing loss of a personal nature in the Czech environment include: being fired from a job or apartment, debt, divorce or relationship breakdown, domestic violence and addictions, leaving a children's home or correctional facilities.
In the American context, critically inaccessible health care and racial imbalance are added.
More: Ester Pacltová, Tereza Malá, Veronika Kličková: Bez předsudků
What Causes Homelessness?
The Wisdom of Trauma – movie
Housing First
The Housing First approach comes from psychologist Sam Tsemberis. He stated that the best way to tackle homelessness is to enable people to live. People don’t have to get a job or get rid of addictions first, housing is seen as a prerequisite for a change in life. In the 1990s, he implemented the first Housing First project in New York City, which showed that the most appropriate tool for ending homelessness was for homeless people to move into mainstream housing and be supported based on their needs.
In the Czech Republic, the Housing First approach is gradually becoming established. A pilot project in Brno, called Rapid Re-housing, has proven its functionality, housing fifty families. Fourteen cities and NGOs across the country have followed up with Housing First projects. This was followed by two calls for European funds, which have resulted in more than 40 similar programs currently being implemented in the Czech Republic. Hundreds of households that were previously in housing need have been rehoused. This call enables the introduction of innovative tools in the Czech Republic that will operate within the framework of the Housing Support Act. This law is likely to be voted on by the Czech Government in May 2025. The innovative tools introduced are an important step towards a systemic end to homelessness.
More: Slovník pojmů: Housing First – Bydlení především
Rapid Re-Housing Brno
Mapa aktuálně realizovaných zabydlovacích projektů
4. Racism in New York and targeted social exclusion
Tenement
What was life like for the poor in one of the world’s richest cities at a time when its population was growing by leaps and bounds?
At the time of the largest migration from Europe, most of them lived in so-called tenements. These were narrow five- to six-storey houses with rentable rooms and shared toilets. At first the rooms were completely windowless, but fires and epidemics in the next fifty years necessitated at least ventilation shafts between the houses and eventually even windows. Around 1900, New York had a population of 3.4 million, of which 2.3 million lived in tenements. The city thus had a density similar to that of Bombay. The tenements were abolished in the 1930s, but they are still an obvious example of how the market deals with housing. As long as there is demand, there is supply. But is such supply still a matter of free choice or just an unwanted existential necessity?
More: Tenements – history and definition
Redlining
Racism is more present in New York than you think. There are secret maps from the 1930s that show poor and blighted areas in American cities in red. Banks were discouraged from investing or making government-backed mortgages in them. These areas were predominantly inhabited by black people who could not buy property. Although much time has passed since the redlining era, it still has noticeable impacts on the city’s appearance today. Today’s poorer neighborhoods correlate with those that were “undesirable” at the time. Thus, systemic social exclusion still leaves people wandering in a vicious cycle, because if a person doesn’t have a property in America, what will guarantee a loan to pay for their children's education?
More: Inequality in New York City – A Legacy of Redlining
Social housing in New York City
Did you know that New York City has a relatively large number of social housing – municipal apartment buildings? From the beginning, they were built sparingly, with narrow, unlit interior corridors and smaller windows. In some of the so-called “projects” of the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA), we can find even rarer solutions, such as elevators that were built only on every second floor. In the densified New York City, these high-rise buildings are clearly distinguished, surrounded by fenced “residual” plots. Today, the housing stock, mostly from the 1950s, is at the end of its useful life, largely due to long-term neglected maintenance. The city is not investing in its buildings, so privatisation or demolition is more likely to be considered.
More: Richard Plunz: A History of Housing in New York City
Population of social housing
And do you know who lives in them? They originally served all segments of the population, but over time, mostly poorer people – African-American and Hispanic – moved into them. It’s just that concentrating one group of people in a place is never a good thing, either for the rich or the poor. This has created clearly legible – even fenced off – socially excluded areas in the middle of the city with high crime rates. It can be seen that the environment alone is not enough, but that it is the quality of the environment that matters.
More: The Rise and Fall of New York Public Housing: An Oral History (New York Times, 2018)
Homelessness and racism
New York City is the city with the largest number of homeless people in America. The racial imbalance is quite evident. 60% of these people are black, 30% are of Hispanic origin and just under 10% are white.
More: Why New York City has the Highest Homeless Population in America
SRO
One interesting form of low-cost housing for individuals has been the so-called SROs (Single Room Occupancy). It consisted of a large room divided by a half partition with a lockable door into small rooms of about 8 square meters where a bed could fit. Bathrooms and kitchenettes were shared. The poor management of this type of housing led to places with high incidences of violence, crime and drugs. Construction of this type ended in the 1960s when housing in SROs began to be considered substandard. On the other hand, however, the concept allowed low-income city residents to attain housing, albeit at the cost of lesser amenities. Today they have been replaced by dormitories.
5. 2050 – a world without homeless people
Comparing costs – investing in consequences or investing in prevention
All public assistance to people in need is more expensive than giving these people access to permanent housing. A simple example, among others, shows this. A child’s monthly stay in an orphanage after being removed from his parents costs 40,000 CZK. And incalculable psychological damage to the child and the whole family. On the other hand, it is possible to provide the family with about half of it – for rent and social support, which they will repay through a repayment plan.
More: Náklady veřejných rozpočtů vyvolané bezdomovectvím a bytovou nouzí
Porovnání pěstounské péče a ústavní péče z hlediska nákladů
Finnish Pioneer
Finland is the only EU country to have managed to permanently reduce the number of homeless people by 75% over the last thirty years. At least a quarter of housing in cities must be affordable social housing. Finland sees housing as a basic human right. Its public policy is based on the principles of Housing First. Continuous efforts by the government, major cities and non-profit organisations have led to the desired result: a radical reduction in the number of homeless people.
More: Which country handles homelessness the best?
Jon Henley: ‘It’s a miracle': Helsinki's radical solution to homelessness (The Guardian, 2019)
Diverse forms of housing
If the current housing stock cannot meet demand, it means that there is a lack of other forms of housing. The housing stock does not respect the transformation of a society that is living solitarily and ageing. New forms of housing based on sharing need to be sought. If we want to reduce housing costs, we need to share what is most expensive – bathrooms and kitchens. This is precisely the architectural problem, to what extent and how it is possible to share.
A pioneering example is the VinziRast-mittendrin project in Vienna, where (formerly) homeless people and students live together.
More: Architektura soužití – VinziRast-mittendrin
Home law
We can also look to history for inspiration for solutions. After the Industrial Revolution, accompanied by a massive migration of the rural population to the cities, which, however, could not cope with the onslaught, Emperor Franz Joseph I amended the so-called Home Rule Law in 1863. The home communities were thus obliged to take care of “their” poor.
More: Domovské právo (Svaz měst a obcí ČR)
Unconditional (guaranteed) income
The idea of unconditional income has its roots in the sixteenth century, when it was formulated by Thomas More. It means a regular cash benefit paid by the state or another public institution in the same amount to a certain group or to all people equally without any conditions. The purpose of this social support would be to provide basic livelihood security, thus eliminating poverty. At the same time, the bureaucratic system of benefits would be simplified. This idea is being piloted in many cities. For example, in the northern borough of Manhattan in New York, starting in 2021, expectant mothers will receive $1,000 a month for a year and a half. Now this successful measure is being rolled out across the board.
More: Sarah Holder: NYC Guaranteed Income Program Goes From Pilot to Permanent (Bllomberg, 2023)
Basic Income For Transition-age Foster Youth In New York
Denver Basic Income Project
A diverse, inclusive and respectful society
Strong, stable and cohesive cities are built on cohesive communities. And these are created by the interconnectedness of people's relationships with each other. And architecture can be a major player in shaping the environment that supports or enables the formation of connections. This principle is documented (among others) in the documentary series Architecture of Coexistence (Architects Without Borders and Artyčok.TV).
Czech hope: the Housing Support Act thanks to the For Housing Initiative
After more than a decade of efforts to pass a social housing law, we are now reaching a milestone that could support both the prevention of a slide into homelessness, the expansion of affordable housing, and the establishment of regular mapping of housing need. The proposed law rests on three pillars. It makes it mandatory for every catchment municipality to establish a Housing Contact Point where anyone with a housing problem can go. The second pillar is the introduction of “housing with a guarantee”. The state will thus guarantee private landlords, through a guarantee fund, that they will receive their rent. The housing market will thus become accessible to discriminated groups of the population and will also be enriched with properties of investment companies (e.g. Heimstaden in Ostrava). The last pillar is the so-called housing assistance, which is based on the principles of Housing First and Housing Led (they differ in the varying degrees of social housing support for people in need).
Once passed, the Act could reduce the number of people in housing need by a third within ten years. Not only will it allow more people to have a home, but it will even save the public money that the housing need problem is now costing us. The passage of the Bill is supported by the broad Housing Initiative, which is made up of individuals and organisations from both the NGO, academic and public sectors. They have been working for a long time to improve the current system of assistance to people and families in housing need.
More: Sociální služby jsou důležité, ale bytovou nouzi nevyřeší
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