Homeless – not hopeless

Leading campaigners tell Greg Daly about the realities of Ireland’s worsening homeless crisis

DePaul CEO Kerry Anthony describes herself as a naturally optimistic person, but faced with the worst homeless crisis that she has seen in 20 years of working with homeless people, she occasionally finds herself asking herself in dismay how we have got to where we are now in Ireland, and what can be done about it.

“I think that’s important for us as organisations, to always say: ‘What more can we do? How can we play the best part we can play in ending the crisis and helping to alleviate the crisis?’.

“For us as an organisation we talk about wanting to end homelessness and change lives and for me that is the key – homelessness is a horrendous place to find yourself and you want to get people out of homelessness as quickly as possible,” she stresses, continuing, “Our job is help people get out of it and make sure it’s only a point in time in their life rather than the defining factor of their life.”

There’s no exaggeration in Kerry’s belief that she’s not known a homelessness crisis so stark. Having drawn together data from the Department of Housing, Planning, Community and Local Government, Focus Ireland have shown that between July 2014 and November 2016, the total number of people known to be homeless in Ireland rose steadily from just over 3,000 to almost 7,000. Much of this rise was due to the new phenomenon of family homelessness, which over the same period rose from just over 300 to over 1,200.

Homeless charities simply weren’t prepared for this, Kerry says, explaining that an unexpected housing shortage has driven this crisis. “Around about 2010 we had a plan in place called ‘The Pathway to Home’ that really was about ending the use of emergency accommodation and focusing on housing-led or Housing First approaches to ending the homelessness crisis,” she says, continuing, “I think at that point in time you wouldn’t have had any argument from the main service providers that that was the way to go, that if we put people into accommodation and provided them with the wraparound support that they would need then they would be able to live in the community again and we would be able to move towards ending long-term homelessness, accepting that short-term homelessness would always be with us.”

Plans

However, she says, “all of that was predicated on the availability of housing”, and once the housing crash came, homeless charities were unable to deliver on such plans, while a new influx of people into homelessness began.

“We saw such an increase in the number of families becoming homeless, mainly because austerity brought with it a reduction in people’s take-home salaries, but they still were paying very high private rental charges. In addition, people were defaulting on their mortgages, and there weren’t measures out in place to keep them in their own homes, maybe through ‘mortgage-to-rent’ schemes, things like that,” she says, observing, “I think probably what happened is that we were behind the curve: we had a plan in place but didn’t really recession-proof that plan. I’m not sure how we could have done that differently because it was a huge financial crisis.”

Matters don’t look set to improve in the immediate future, says Mike Allen, Focus Ireland’s director of advocacy. While the month-on-month increase in the number of families entering homelessness seem to have slowed since last summer, numbers are still on the rise overall. Although figures for December and January won’t be available until next month, he expects the numbers to show a big spike for this month, as happened in previous Januaries.

“Whether it will be as large as in previous years we hope not, but it would be very surprising if it wasn’t similar,” he says, continuing, “What happens is that homelessness in December is delayed, and then it emerges in January.

“There’s a couple of factors. One of them is landlords who are evicting tenants are likely to be reluctant to do that in the run up to Christmas, and will give people the extra month and hang on for that period of time, or if people are made homeless at that period of time, they go to family rather than to emergency accommodation so they are homeless in December but they don’t turn up at homeless services until January.”

Families tend to stick together over Christmas, he adds, but overcrowding and other tensions emerge in January, causing people to seek emergency accommodation.

Evictions are playing an important role in this rise, he says, cautioning that the most recent figures have been delayed but that there are suggestions that about a third of families become homeless because their landlord is selling up, with this becoming an increasingly prevalent factor driving homelessness.

“We don’t actually know what’s behind that,” he says, continuing, “The landlord could be selling up because property prices have recovered and it’s a commercial move to do so, but anecdotally that’s not really what’s happening. Anecdotally, what’s happening is that the landlord is under enormous pressure to sell up through what the banks call ‘encouraged sales’ when they’re falling behind in their mortgages, or banks have repossessed the property from the landlord, and therefore the tenant gets evicted.”

Admitting that it’s difficult to gather proper data on this, he says he thinks the Department of Housing should be investing in research into that area.

Despite extensive coverage of the effects of so-called ‘vulture funds’, he notes that the impact of such funds haven’t really been seen by Focus. “It’s not surprising that we wouldn’t be seeing those, because they’re such a tiny portion of the market, though extremely dramatic,” he says. “Over 95% of landlords own one or two properties, so the number of cases where landlords own 20 properties is miniscule. This doesn’t mean that it’s not having an impact on the housing market, but it’s not large enough for us to see it.”

Pressure

The effect of this on people working for Focus has been predictably gruelling, he says, noting that “specifically on the family homelessness side, there’s been enormous pressure on the team, who’ve been running very hard to stand still”.

Pointing out that the homeless executive has increased funding for the charity, enabling it to take on more case managers so more families can be helped, he says, “There are more people doing it, but that service is under a lot more pressure as all the services are. It’s very hard on the staff.”

Many of the staff are young and relatively young, and so are themselves under the kind of rental pressures faced by the people they help, Mike adds, commenting that, “This isn’t a problem affecting the homeless, who are a different group of people over there: this is a problem affecting people right up to the average and even substantially above the average wage, beginning to be very insecure in their housing”

Despite these pressures, he says, Focus are doing well. “We are actually moving more families out of homelessness every month than we were before – we moved far more families in 2016 into secure homes than we did in 2015 – there’s been a real ramping up of that,” he says, describing as “a success” the slowing down of the national rise in homeless families, with “substantial achievements” being made.

DePaul, meanwhile, are no less busy in their efforts to help homeless people in especially challenging situations. “Our background is Vincentian,” says Kerry, “so our commitment is to working with people who need us most and those that others might struggle to work with – we’ve always been committed to working with people who have very complex needs, with addictions, with chronic mental health issues.”

Explaining that DePaul is currently working in the areas of prevention, vulnerable families, addiction and criminal justice, Kerry says, “We have a range of services to put support into the community, day centre services, long-term accommodation – it’s right across the spectrum what we do.”

Of late, she says, the charity has been providing about 480 bed-spaces every night across the island of Ireland, with about 320 in Dublin alone.

Most recently, she says, they opened a 65-bed emergency hostel on Little Britain Street. “It really is the kind of frontline work we’re doing to try to alleviate the immediate crisis of people sleeping on the streets,” she says. “Five years ago I would have been saying very clearly that we need to move away from emergency hostels, we need to move to housing, and now it feels like I’m contradicting myself five years on, but the situation is that when you have a crisis you have to take a pragmatic approach and see what you can deliver in the short term.”

At the same time, she says, such beds should not be retained any longer than necessary. “They should only be there as long as they’re needed and then they should not be there,” she says, explaining that the new hostel provides about a third of the emergency beds announced by the Government before Christmas, and is intended as a stepping stone out of homelessness.

“A night shelter as only a night shelter really doesn’t offer very much at all, it really just offers a bed and then people have to get up and go in the morning,” she says, “so we advocated to have three workers attached to Little Britain Street.”

Support

These support workers help register, assess and support those people who use the hostel, she says, with a view to helping them get six-month beds, and then eventually move into regular accommodation.

“We are, through our six-months beds, moving people into housing,” she says, continuing, “it’s just much, much slower than we would want and much slower than we need in terms of people coming into the system.”

The occupation of Apollo House over Christmas by the newly-established Home Sweet Home group helped draw a fresh spotlight onto the homelessness crisis, but, Kerry says, “What people were calling from within Apollo House, we’ve been calling for year in, year out, advocating to Government around the issues to do with housing.”

Noting that “It’s always welcome to have the debate in the media, but organisations like DePaul are working on this day in, day out, and we need volunteers to come and support our work,” she points out that the Dublin Housing Network is composed of an array of such established charities as DePaul, Focus, Simon, Merchant’s Quay Ireland and Crosscare, saying that she would be “really keen that if people wanted to get involved that they did get involved with established organisations”.

Replication

The charities in the Homeless Network work together in a coordinated way so replication of roles is avoided and information is effectively shared in order best to help people experiencing homelessness, she says, “And I do think a coordinated approach is the best way to go, so I would encourage people to come and talk to organisations like ourselves or others and see how they can get practically involved.”

Apollo House reflected a very real sense of frustration about the homelessness crisis, Mike Allen observes, noting that “people working in homeless organisations know that there is a very strong public sense among the majority of Irish people that they don’t want people to be homeless. They don’t want families to be homeless, and they don’t want single people to be homeless, whether on the streets or in miserable accommodation.”

This attitude to homelessness has long been strong in Ireland, he says, and has historically been expressed in generosity to homeless charities.

While he worries that “there is a real sense that people are beginning to feel that very large scale family homelessness, which we didn’t have four years ago, is a natural phenomenon that’s there in the background,” he says that overall a growing sense of frustration with the homeless crisis is clear. A big part of the problem, he says, is that “the Government has been saying the same things – the same good things – again and again, but it’s not happening”.

Apollo House, he says, “was an expression of that frustration, but also a lightning rod for it – because somebody was seen to be doing something”. It remains to be seen, he says, whether it should have a sustainable effect with its energies being harnessed to drive genuine progress.

“The real risk of sudden expressions of concern about homelessness is that they turn into more emergency beds, and that isn’t the answer,” he cautions, noting that Dublin had about 1,300 emergency beds when Jonathan Corrie died just metres from Leinster House in December 2014, and that the capital has about 2,000 emergency beds now.

“That isn’t really any better: it’s keeping people off the streets, obviously, but it’s not solving the problem,” he says, continuing, “what people need to do is a political question, so they do need to communicate to their TDs and politicians that they’re looking for nobody to be on the street but they don’t think that’s enough.”

Stressing that “it’s not all bad news” when it comes to homelessness in Ireland, Mike points out that 70 people who averaged 10 years on the streets each were moved into Housing First accommodation earlier this month, and says “This thing could seriously be getting better if we could just prevent people from losing their homes.”

He mentions how an anti-evictions bill Focus had helped draft was voted down by the Government last week, with Fianna Fáil abstaining. “People need to be asking Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael TDs why they’re votying these things down, and if they’re flawed, when are they going to bring in something that isn’t flawed,” he says, adding: “Politicians will respond to that question being asked.”