Inadequate housing in Europe

The phenomenon of substandard or inadequate housing [mal-logement] encompasses a range of different situations. What obstacles do people who are excluded from adequate housing have to face, and what is their daily life like?

An interview with INED researcher Pascale Dietrich-Ragon and Marie Loison of the Laboratoire Printemps, co-editors of a new collective research work on homelessness, La face cachée du mal-logement [The unknown side of being poorly housed].

They share certain features that do not change over time. As might be expected, these are people of lower or working-class background with little education and generally precarious lives. Family and marital break-up and dislocation as well as disconnection from paid work are also recurrent in this group. However, the most marginalized among them, especially the homeless, have markedly less in the way of family contact than any other category: they receive no family support, and their trajectories are what could be called hyper-institutionalized (time in child protection services, institutional facilities of one kind or another, contact with social workers, etc.). Violence is also recurrent. An increase in the number of people with ties to immigration has also been observed recently: because there are not enough openings in the facilities designed to receive them, these people end up depending on homeless services. Overall, the issue of unhoused people sheds light on the widening of social inequalities in French society as well as flaws in existing social policies and increasingly inhospitable immigrant reception policies. 

Here it is important to distinguish between people who have their own place to live and people living on a more or less permanent basis in institutional shelters and facilities, as those experiences are very different. Living on the street requires extremely time-consuming “survival work.” The person has to get themselves to various aid facilities, beg to procure resources, put in requests for emergency shelter, etc. However, many homeless people live in facilities designed to house them, and some have jobs. For these men and women, finding a place of their own to live proves extremely complicated given the current shortage of housing and fierce competition for available units. In the end, being homeless involves a great deal of real work. To ensure subsistence and to even hope to find a place—or another place—to live for at least a while, these people have to be in continued contact with institutions and advocacy organizations and constantly reiterate administrative formalities. 

The main means of moving beyond homelessness is subsidized housing, which is why it is so important to support ambitious policies of social housing construction for particularly disadvantaged persons. It is also necessary to ensure their access to more continuous guidance. Many persons are shunted back and forth between facilities, receive no long-term follow-up or accompaniment, and end up repeatedly on the street. This short-term policy approach creates disillusion, with the result that homeless people stop turning to assistance services they have a right to.