Last Thursday and Friday in the city of Prague the National Meeting of People in Need of Housing took place. Homeless, impoverished people, whose opinions are usually ignored by most, developed interesting proposals during two days of concentrated work, proposals which, not surprisingly, could be used as a basis for addressing the problem of social housing here.
The 20 homeless people involved didn’t just formulate the problems, but contributed possible solutions to them. They based those solutions on their own stories.
Five, 10 or even 20 years ago, all of their stories often began in very similar ways – contracting a serious illness, debt collections, going through an ordinary divorce, losing a job, moving into a residential hotel – and the lack of interest among those around them to help was also similar. That lack of interest began first with their own families, and often was followed by a lack of interest among officials, i.e., municipalities and the state.
When I sat with these people, I realized once again that society responds to poverty in a short-sighted way. We only respond by wanting to get it out of our sight.
We sneer at these people, label them inadaptable, lazy and stupid, and let them roam around in the world while things go from bad to worse for them. Last week’s meeting, however, demonstrated that those who have found the courage to talk about their failures in life, their poverty – which is often connected with shame – have manage to retain and even to further develop a perspective on their lives that includes some wisdom.
This wisdom is the kind one sometimes acquires when one must address existential questions, when what is at stake is one’s children, one’s family, one’s very life. For example, how to feed your children on CZK 500 a month when all the rest of your money is swallowed up by a residential hotel landlord who is renting you a single room without heating, running water, or a stove for cooking.
What might surprise many is that these impoverished people often were not thinking primarily of themselves (as one lady said, "I wish everyone could have what I have – I’m good, I love my husband and he loves me"). They were thinking of others, because their own experience of poverty has given them a different kind of background against which to perceive life and society: They don’t view it as a competition against everyone else, but as a collaboration.
It’s not just about the residential hotels
The gigantic, year-on-year growth in the disbursal of state housing payments and the situation in the residential hotels, through which a super-lucrative business began running several years ago based on those payments, has helped the public reach the political consensus that something must be done about this (during the first quarter of this year, CZK 797.3 million in housing payments was distributed compared to CZK 603.1 million last year and CZK 353.5 million the year before that). Other, probably just as serious findings are still ignored, including a gigantic growth of almost the same dimensions in the disbursal of state housing allowances (the state disbursed CZK 2.12 billion for such allowances during the first quarter of this year, CZK 440 million more than during the same period last year and more than CZK 770 million more than the year before that).
That means it’s not just the people who live in residential hotels instead of standard rentals who are having problems with paying for housing, but also tenants in relatively ordinary housing – low-income households, senior citizens, or single-parent families in apartments. Without some sort of social welfare, often precisely to cover their housing costs, around one million of the working poor would also fall into poverty here, i.e., those who draw wages that are not enough to cover a reasonable expenditure on housing.
What does this mean? It means that in the Czech Republic there is a social housing system already functioning that is totally flawed and extraordinarily risky, based solely on welfare, not on any of the other essential pillars such as social apartments (municipally-owned ones or whatever we want to call them) and good social work, which must be a bulwark for those who cannot orient themselves on their own in their difficulties without professional help.
This system has been undermined as a result of the disbursal point of some of these housing benefits being transferred from the municipalities to the state Labor Offices. No one today is able to say what percentage of the recent growth in state housing payments is caused by an objective increase in the number of people at risk of losing their housing and what percentage of that increase is due to these residential hotels owned by businesspeople who noticed that the state was unable to monitor what purpose the housing benefits were actually serving once the housing payment agenda was transferred to the Labor Offices.
None of the 600 new Labor Office staffers who will be running around in the field monitoring whose pockets this welfare is ending up in will resolve the current situation, nor will the establishment of a ceiling for state housing payments, as useful as that may be. These are just cosmetic interventions.
The only thing that will resolve it is to take advantage of the existing political agreement on what is perhaps too simplistically being called "social housing" here, which means, in practice, that in the Czech Republic there will be a financial and legislative anchoring of the following: a) the existence of social apartments 2) the disbursal of non-discriminatory welfare to support housing 3) the provision of social work that will be available, without exception, to anyone who needs it during a housing crisis. Also, that other legislative defects will be fixed that have facilitated the further indebtedness of the already-indebted (including caps on attorney fees) or the verbal conclusion of agreements to rent, for example, cellars or garages as housing (the Civil Code).
How much will this cost the state? The question is appropriate, of course.
Just as in many similar cases, we will soon discover that while this solution will be costly, it definitely will not cost more than the current state of affairs. All we have to do is start adding it all up: The cost of hemorrhaging welfare, the cost of remediating broken homes and arranging for children to be reared elsewhere, the cost of addressing social exclusion or social ghettos, etc.
The proposals for a solution, naturally, must include the creation of a standard economic balance-sheet, which lists the costs on the one hand and the savings created by the solution on the other, a so-called RIA (Regulatory Impact Assessment). After the recent elections the political cards have now been dealt differently and the voters will be more welcoming of such changes.
The Labor Ministry is tasked with preparing legislative solutions for social housing within the next two years, and the Regional Development Ministry and Human Rights Ministry are to assist it. They all have the strong support of the ombud, the Czech Government Agency for Social Inclusion, and the 30 civil society representatives and experts associated in the Platform for Social Housing.
More and more local governments are also voicing the following sentiment: Give us more responsibility for social housing, but don’t leave us to handle it on our own without any actual financial and legislative aid. At this point it’s more a question of managing the entire transformation than it is one of political will.
We must organize this legislative work well so we don’t waste this unique opportunity to address the problem of homelessness in the Czech Republic. We are not doing this just for the poor, but for society as a whole.
The majority of western countries have already taken similar steps, and we should complete a successful leap forward on this issue here as well. The voices of those affected by this problem should not be ignored.
