The first European Anti-Poverty Strategy: a necessary step that must not leave behind people without a home
– The first European Anti-Poverty Strategy sets the ambition to eradicate poverty in the EU by 2050. A necessary commitment that, however, treats homelessness almost as a residual issue, despite it being the most extreme expression of systemic failure.
– With 1.28 million people experiencing homelessness in Europe, at HOGAR SÍ we recognise the progress made by the Strategy, but we also ask for what is still missing: housing-led models as the standard solution, accurate measurement of homelessness, and effective funding – not just frameworks on paper.
The European Commission has formally published the first European Union Anti-Poverty Strategy. Long called for by civil society organisations across the EU, the Strategy comes at a moment of pressing urgency: today, one in five people in the European Union is at risk of poverty or social exclusion. In total, this amounts to 93 million people.
At HOGAR SÍ, we celebrate the fact that Europe is clearly naming the problem and setting an ambition that is as explicit as it is necessary: to eradicate poverty in the European Union by 2050. The Strategy rightly recognises that poverty is not a single socioeconomic circumstance, but rather an accumulative process shaped by multiple factors throughout a person’s life: childhood poverty, young people becoming disconnected from the labour market and inadequate pensions are all links in the same chain. In the case of homelessness, this becomes even more evident, as it represents one of the most brutal expressions of poverty.
It is equally important to identify the right to dignity as a fundamental principle, rather than merely a discretionary benefit or an aspiration. By explicitly linking poverty to the violation of rights, the Strategy adopts precisely the approach we promote at HOGAR SÍ: people experiencing homelessness do not merely face material deprivation, they experience systematic violations of their rights to health, privacy, safety and even life itself.
The document also rightly highlights discrimination on socioeconomic grounds, what is known as aporophobia – prejudice and discrimination on people experiencing poverty. Through Hogar Sí’s Hate Crime Observatory, HATEnto, we have worked for years to make hate crimes against people experiencing homelessness visible. Our work allows us to confirm, through both data and individual cases, that this violence exists and that impunity fuels it. The fact that Europe is beginning to name this problem is very important and, in particular, the Fundamental Rights Agency’s (FRA) plans to analyse discrimination based on socioeconomic status within national legal frameworks are undoubtedly a step in the right direction.
However, it is important to point out that throughout the document, homelessness – the most extreme and visible form of poverty – appears almost as a footnote among the Strategy’s broader priorities. There is a reference to the Recommendation on housing exclusion presented alongside the Strategy, accompanied by a footnote mentioning the 2025 Affordable Housing Plan, but very little more. For a document that presents itself as comprehensive and aimed at eradicating poverty, this is not enough, especially when, as the document itself acknowledges, around one million people in the European Union are experiencing homelessness.
At HOGAR SÍ, we maintain, based on evidence, that the only effective response to homelessness is housing, together with the personalised support that each person may need. Not the management of emergency situations, not temporary accommodation, not a pathway of reintegration that must be completed before accessing a home, nor the struggle to move upwards through the institutional staircase. Housing first, with the necessary support.
Models based on housing, such as Housing First, are currently the paradigm with the strongest scientific evidence behind them and have demonstrated the best results across Europe. The Strategy briefly refers to this approach in the Recommendation on housing, but it is essential that it becomes a central approach and a funding standard for all Member States if we ever want to achieve lasting and genuinely transformative impact.
Furthermore, although the Strategy proposes improving the measurement of poverty through new indicators on affordability and material deprivation, an ambition that deserves recognition, there is a real risk: technical improvements to indicators could obscure the fact that the most extreme forms of exclusion remain invisible in official statistics. People experiencing homelessness are all too often among those missing from surveys measuring poverty. They have no postal address, they do not respond to household surveys, and they do not appear in employment records.
The document’s ambition to obtain more granular and geographically disaggregated data is meaningful, but it must be accompanied by an explicit commitment to measuring homelessness in all Member States, using comparable and periodic methodologies, as we have been demanding for over many years alongside FEANTSA and other European organisations.
This challenge must also be addressed at the national level. The Strategy calls on all Member States to establish national anti-poverty frameworks and appoint coordinators at the highest political level. Spain, for its part, adopted its National Strategy to Combat Homelessness 2023-2030 in 2023, a step that we at HOGAR SÍ welcomed.
A strategy may exist on paper, but what turns it into real policy is funding and the political will to implement it. The European Strategy provides Member States with a framework and a mandate. The question is whether there will be sufficient political will to translate that framework into public policies that genuinely ensure that no one has to sleep on the streets of Europe.
The way out of homelessness is through providing each person with the support they need. That is what we are asking of Europe. That is what we work to build every day.
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