The Arrels Foundation, with the support of more than 600 volunteers, went on the night of December 3 to count the number of people sleeping on the streets of Barcelona. Distributed in all the different neighborhoods and districts, the teams carried out a visual count, without surveys or interviews, and located 1,982 people in this situation, i.e. 43% more than during the last census carried out by the same entity in 2023. The assessment, presented this Wednesday, does not include the places in the reception centers – the 100 beds of the winter campaign activated on December 2 – nor the 63 people who live at El airport. Prat, nor those who reside in colonies. “It’s a minimum number, because these are only the people our volunteers were able to see,” explained the director of Arrels, Beatriz Fernández.
The count shows an increase in homeless people in all districts of the city and for the first time, Ciutat Vella is no longer the district with the most people sleeping on the streets. The growth was particularly significant in Sants-Montjuïc, which includes the area around the free zone, with an increase of more than 50% and in Sant Martí, where the increase is close to 70%. The report also highlights a greater presence of elements already detected in previous years, such as the massive presence of tents and groups of people who live together in public spaces.
According to the foundation, these dynamics, although not analyzed from a qualitative point of view, demonstrate increasingly heterogeneous homelessness, marked by differences in nationality, age or professional status, and demonstrate “the need for a transversal approach to the problem on the part of public administrations”. “We are talking about a situation that requires inter-administrative and inter-ministerial coordination at the regional level. It cannot be addressed only as a specific emergency. It is necessary to have stable resources that are not subject to a short and defined temporality,” Fernández emphasized.
Following the presentation of the report, the parliamentary groups Junts per Barcelona and Barcelona en Comú convened an extraordinary plenary session to “address the management of homelessness by the municipal government”. The proposal of the municipal groups, which have the necessary votes to force the mayor, Jaume Collboni, to convene the plenary session, provides for the debate, among other measures, of an action plan against homelessness endowed with 60 million euros. Among the planned actions are the creation of a low-demand center and the strengthening of programs such as Housing first.
The entity’s analysis coincides with the conclusions of the recent report of the Department of Social Rights of the Generalitat, commissioned from a group of experts and published last week. Although the nature of the data is different (one based on a count and the other on INE figures on people who use social services), the Public Administration and the entity agree on the need for a transversal action plan going beyond social services.
For this reason, Arrels also warns of difficulties in accessing social services, which they describe as “saturated”. “If we approach it only as a social services problem, we fail to understand that it is a question of coordination between different areas, such as health, immigration or housing,” added the director. Among the factors that explain the increase in homelessness, the entity highlights the price of housing, the difficulty of accessing registration and the precariousness of employment, which limits the availability of stable jobs with sufficient resources.
The Fundació Arrels count was carried out in different time slots to capture the different dynamics of people spending the night on the streets. “More people than expected participated, not only because of the number, but also because of the involvement they showed,” underlines the foundation. The study does not include an analysis of the settlements – spaces with physical barriers that prevent access – nor of the El Prat airport, although the entity recalls that around 63 people live there. In recent weeks, the presence of homeless people in terminals has been in the news again after the airport restricted entry to people without boarding passes.
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