Ronda Universitat, Plaça de Catalunya, the Rambla and the Barcelona Cathedral. The list may seem like a tourist route through the center of the Catalan capital, but for the students of the Higher Degree in Social Integration at the CEDESCA study center today it is something more. For these young people, these are the places where homeless citizens lived and died, but with names and history, whom they honored this Thursday with the placement of plaques.
The initiative has been carried out by a total of 14 educational centers in the city and is part of a campaign by the Fundació Arrels, which these days remembers the homeless people who died during the last decade on the streets of Barcelona. This is a total of 554 men and women.
Rabab, an 18-year-old student, was in charge this Thursday of placing the plates of Lidia, 47, and Souleyman, who was only 20 when she died. Both names appear on the wall at the entrance to the parish of Santa Anna, in the center of the city, along with two more names: Haroldo, whose age is unknown, and Abdessamal, who was the same age as the student. , 18 years old. Each sheet is accompanied by a motto: “Living on the street kills.”
“It’s common, we always see them on the street [a las personas sin hogar]”, explains Rabab, “we were not surprised by the place where they died, but by their age, that they were such young people.”
“Sometimes homeless people are related to older people and seeing people who are 20 or 30 years old is shocking,” explains Carme Larrosa, Rabab’s teacher. She teaches the group of the FP cycle of Social Integration and, within their syllabus, they already investigate homelessness, but she assures that through this activity they get the students to better understand the situation of these groups at risk and they also make known the work of the Arrels Foundation. “Few stop to think that they are people and have their stories behind them,” reflects the teacher.
The Arrels campaign aims to denounce the health risks of being homeless, a reality that more than 3,000 people suffer in Barcelona, according to the entity’s latest count in 2023. The work in collaboration with the institutes begins in the classrooms, where Previously, students address the phenomenon of homelessness with their teachers. It then continues into the streets, where students place black cardboard plaques with each person’s name, age, and date of death.
In addition, the students also take a route through the marked places to learn the story of each deceased homeless person and finally, on October 30, in an event open to the public in the Plaza de la Catedral de Barcelona, the Fundació Arrels will remember those people who lived poorly on the streets and who have died during 2024.
During the route to place the plaques, the last stop of Rabab’s class is on the Rambla, where Miguel A’s is hanging. This man, born in Teruel, was 74 years old. Despite not being very talkative, he always appreciated sharing a coffee or an ice cream with the people at the Fundació Arrels. He never wanted to accept the offers they made to him to go to a shelter. As an adult, he was content to smoke some Victoria brand cigars and let the hours pass by watching tourists pass by the center of Barcelona, until last August 2023 he died.
Living on the streets takes away life expectancy
Although the commemorative plaques are made of cardboard and will easily be removed from the street by rain, wind or by people walking by themselves, the Arrels Foundation, together with other entities, has been honoring the deceased for nine years now, preventing fall into oblivion. “People who die in the streets have the right to remember,” explains Beatriz Fernández, director of the Fundació Arrels. This is the third year that the project also incorporates educational centers.
“In this year’s figures that will be published soon we see a slight increase [en el número de fallecidos]”, points out the director of Arrels. He explains that this is due, in part, to the fact that entities do an increasingly attentive and meticulous job of monitoring homeless people. Even so, being able to explore the real causes of deaths is a great challenge, since the foundations and platforms that collaborate with the homeless do not have access to their autopsies or any medical report of their death.
“The average lifespan of a person who lives on the street is between 42 and 52 years,” explains Fernández. This figure is more than 40 years below the average of the general population of Barcelona, which is 83 years old. These people, who have high mobility due to not having a place to live, are unlikely to be linked to a primary care center and, therefore, if they are sick or have a chronic condition, they cannot go for check-ups, which leads to an easier deterioration of their condition. “Living on the streets causes worsening health and in many cases premature death,” concludes the director of the foundation.
The data also reveals an increase in younger age groups, reducing the average age to 43 years, according to the results of the 2023 report Viure on the way to Barcelona. X-ray of a city sense llar. Furthermore, the director of the foundation explains that leaving the streets behind is very complicated, because even if their situation improved “they would not be able to access the private housing market in Barcelona or Catalonia, which requires a stable economic situation.” The Guaranteed Income of Citizenship, which now complements the Minimum Living Income, is not enough for a rental.
“Due to health or age issues, they cannot access the labor market and, without support behind them, it is very difficult for them to get ahead, because there is no adequate public housing system,” insists Fernández.
Nobody sleeps on the street because they want to.
“When someone imagines their future as a child, they do not dream of being a homeless person,” explains the director of the foundation. Homelessness is a problem that is interrelated with several risk factors. Family problems, emotional losses or layoffs can lead a person to not have a support network and end up sleeping on the streets. She remembers a former collaborator of the entity who used to defend that “we are closer to ending up on the street than to having a yacht.”
Even though it is such a close reality, the city of Barcelona has gradually become more hostile towards these people with nowhere to go. According to the entity, with the implementation of ‘Pla Endreça’, the Catalan capital has become more rigid when it comes to applying coexistence laws, preventing homeless people from having a place to leave their belongings, as well as being fined more frequently. . The foundation defends that living on the streets is not a problem of coexistence, but rather a violation of the right to housing, and, therefore, it should not be regulatory in the same way.
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