Newly Poor Emerge : Homeless: A Problem in Europe, Too : EUROPE: Recession, Winter Aggravate Problems of Homeless

It was long after midnight on a bleak, freezing Saturday morning when two Salvation Army trucks pulled up under the arches of Charing Cross Bridge, and workers emerged carrying hot soup and warm blankets.

Years ago, “Underneath the Arches” was a popular song that dealt with happy-go-lucky tramps who spent their nights in the shelter of London’s railroad bridges. Today, the words refer to the cheerless places where the most destitute of Britain’s homeless sleep out in the open, even in sub-freezing weather.

This is not a situation that is uniquely British. As in the United States, homeless people have become a problem all across Europe.

Stragglers in Holland

In Amsterdam, not far from where prostitutes are displayed in show windows framed in neon, the homeless can be seen straggling into hostels for a hot meal and a night’s lodging.

In Paris, some of them huddle along the Seine River, and others file into subway stations that have been opened to the homeless because of the bitter cold sweeping across the continent.

In Dublin, they camp on the quayside of the River Liffey and on St. Stephen’s Green.

In Germany, Belgium and Italy, too, the ranks of the homeless have increased to such an extent that they have become a perplexing problem for governments and charitable agencies. The United Nations has designated 1987 as a Year of Shelter for the Homeless.

All across Western Europe, Times correspondents found public and private agencies working overtime in an effort to find ways of dealing with the homeless.

Aid From Church

The extent of the problem varies from one country to another, depending on the level of unemployment and the resources of the agencies dealing with the homeless. The situation is partly alleviated in such countries as Italy, Belgium and Ireland by the Roman Catholic Church, which plays an important role in sheltering the homeless.

In countries with a strong extended-family tradition, among them Italy, Spain and Portugal, help is provided by relatives. In all the European countries, charitable agencies are a source of help, and they are supported by government subsidies.

In London, two major charitable organizations are dealing with the problem, the Salvation Army and a group called Shelter. The situation in London is particularly acute because the city attracts so many unemployed from throughout Britain and the Commonwealth.

In Western Europe as in the United States, there have always been vagrants, drifters who for one reason or another--poverty, alcoholism, sometimes choice--tend to live in the rough, sleeping where they happen to be, wrapped in cardboard or newspapers.

But a different class of homeless is emerging, the so-called new poor. They are young and old, male and female. Some have been evicted from their homes, or released from prisons and mental hospitals. What they have in common is that they are poor and unable to find work or a place to live. And their numbers are growing.

Typical is Gwen, 40. She and her four children were evicted from their London home because she owed $2,500 in overdue mortgage payments.

“My husband had walked out two years previously,” she told a reporter, “and his maintenance payments had long since ended. The local authority would only offer us temporary bed-and-breakfast accommodation. When this finishes, it looks as though we will be out on the streets, and the children taken into (foster) care.”

More Women Homeless

Claire Booker, an official of Shelter in London, said: “The popular image of the homeless as down-and-out alcoholics is no longer true. We have a new class, the new homeless. There are a lot more young people and families on the street, and more women. Traditionally, hostels were for men. Now we have to create some for women.”

Officially, there are about 200,000 homeless people in England, but Shelter officials put the number at twice that figure. They estimate the number in London alone at 10,000.

The Salvation Army, supported by private contributions and government grants, provides food from kitchens along the Thames River embankment, under the bridge at Charing Cross, in the fields of Lincoln’s Inn law courts and in the vicinity of the South Bank cultural complex, where the destitute seek shelter on concrete ledges of the Hayward Art Gallery and in the parking lot of Queen Elizabeth Hall.

“We do the best we can,” a Salvation Army officer said, “but in this kind of weather, it’s hard to develop any kind of rehabilitation effort. We’re just trying to keep them alive. There are people on the street who have simply given up hope.”

In many West European cities, including London, a major factor is the economic recession, which has thrown so many people out of work and deprived them of the means to pay rent or make mortgage payments. Moreover, there is not enough public housing to meet the need, and many governments have had to reduce their public housing budgets.

Housing Cutbacks

“We should be creating new housing,” Shelter’s Booker said. “Instead, there’s been a 50% cutback in new building under the Conservative government. But even the last Labor government was cutting back on new housing, in 1979.”

Shelter does not provide housing. It offers advice and support to the homeless, and it tries to persuade Parliament to spend more for housing. Several Labor members of Parliament have taken up the call for more housing funds.

“Building and improving housing are running at rock-bottom levels,” Shelter Director Neil McIntosh said. “The homeless continue to be stigmatized, and the recent callous reduction in the levels of housing benefits can only make things harder for the least well-off.”

Now, according to official sources, the weekly limitation on what the Department of Social Security will allow for accommodating a homeless person is to be cut in the government’s new budget.

The consequences, as one Shelter official put it, include “desperate families in hostels and substandard housing; elderly homeowners unable to afford repairs; children in local authority care centers, for no other reason than the homelessness of their parents; tenants and mortgagers experiencing the despair of debt, often for the first time.”

In Britain, care for the homeless is assigned to local government agencies, but spending constraints have left the homeless low on their list of priorities. Often, local authorities put the homeless up in hostels or in the small bed-and-breakfast establishments that cater to welfare cases.

Dickensian Squalor

These hostelries are often cramped places where a large family may have to share a single room in Dickensian squalor, places run by avaricious landlords who skimp on food and accommodations.

A 26-year-old London man who declined to give a reporter any name at all said he prefers to live in “Cardboard City,” a makeshift encampment, rather than in housing provided by the authorities, which is often bug-ridden.

“You’ve got a choice,” he said. “In one of those places, you wake up scratching. Out in the open, you seize up with the cold, but at least you feel free.”

Unemployment underlies the homeless problem throughout Europe, but the contributing factors vary from place to place.

In Dublin, Salvation Army Maj. Derek Dolling said there has been “a big rise in the number of homeless because of families breaking up as younger members leave to seek work.” He said Ireland’s “largest export is people.”

The Catholic Church runs day centers in Dublin where food is distributed to the needy. And the Salvation Army is planning a long-range rehabilitation program.

“The real problem,” Dolling said, “is that rehabilitation work demands almost a one-to-one ratio of staff to homeless. We can help a person pull himself together, fix himself up and go out for a job interview. But this means you need money and dedicated people.”

In France, the new poor consist mainly of people who have been out of work so long they are no longer eligible for unemployment benefits. They have no money for food or housing.

‘I Am Hungry’

Officials say there are about 600,000 of these people in France today, 10 times the number of a decade ago. Young people can be seen slumped on Paris sidewalks with signs advising: “I am out of work. I have no place to stay, and I am hungry.”

Daniel Druesne of Secours Catholique, a major charity organization, said: “Four or five years ago, people came to us for help in making ends meet. Then they started asking us to pay their electricity bills. Today they are asking us for food.”

Emmaus, a charitable group that works with the poor and homeless, estimates the number of homeless in Paris at 8,000 to 10,000, with only 2,500 beds available for them.

Jean-Paul Bourel of Emmaus said that only about 7% of Paris’ homeless are vagrants in the classic sense. The rest belong to the new poor. Emmaus estimates that in all France there are 7 million who fall into the new poor category, and that 4 million of them are illiterate.

On a recent evening at the Salvation Army center in Paris’ Latin Quarter, men and women of all age were waiting at 7 p.m. to get something to eat and shelter for the night.

Rocky, a homeless 30-year-old man, told a reporter: “Once I was married and had a job as a waiter. Then one day I got sick and had to stop working. Suddenly I found myself divorced, without a home and without any money to raise my two daughters. Let me tell you, if I hadn’t had my two kids, I would have become a bum, drinking my life away. But I’ve sent my daughters to stay with my father in Corsica, and I am trying to get by.”

‘A Vicious Circle’

Others have shared his bad luck. The newspaper Liberation quoted a man who identified himself as Charles, 40, and had lost his job as a polisher in jewelry shops:

“It is an experience. At the beginning, I was a little ashamed to sleep on the benches. Then, I met other guys like myself. I am afraid of being trapped in a vicious circle. I spend so much energy looking for a place to sleep or for something to eat that I have hardly any energy left to look for a job. Moreover, you are considered as an animal. But the most terrible thing is the feeling that you have lost your identity and rights.”

At the national level, the French government is taking steps to deal with the problem. It has authorized charity organizations to rent low-cost housing from government agencies and sublet it to homeless people until they can get back on their feet.

Also, the government has budgeted about $50 million over a two-year period to subsidize rents on housing arranged through social organizations.

The poor have become a political issue in France. The Socialist government of Francois Mitterrand is being criticized for not taking measures to avoid the emergence of this new underclass. Specifically, Mitterrand has been criticized for a 1982 decision to reduce the level and duration of unemployment benefits.

In Belgium, the problem is much less serious than in France, partly because the population is smaller, but also because the government recognizes the need to subsidize institutions that care for the homeless.

“Very few people are sleeping in the streets,” Col. Pierre Westphal of the Salvation Army said in Brussels. “I don’t suppose there are any more than 5,000 listed as homeless in the entire country.”

In the Netherlands, several charitable agencies devote their efforts to the homeless, including the Salvation Army, which maintains a hostel in the heart of Amsterdam’s red light district.

Problem of Drugs

The problem in Amsterdam is made worse by the large numbers of young people who gravitate to the city because of the availability of drugs. Maj. D.C. Verpoorte of the Salvation Army estimates that there are 4,000 homeless in the country, half of them in Amsterdam.

“The problem is not as bad as in London or Paris,” said Verpoorte, whose organization tries to emphasize rehabilitation and jobs for the homeless.

West Germany has had a housing problem like no other. Much of its housing was destroyed in World War II, and the shortage was compounded by the arrival of about 13 million refugees who poured in from Soviet-occupied areas after the war.

But by the mid-1960s the West German “economic miracle” had reduced the number of homeless to the extent that the federal government stopped collecting statistical data on the problem.

Today, there are signs that statistics are needed again. West Germany now has its highest unemployment rate of the postwar era, around 10%, and the opposition Social Democrats are making a political issue of “the new poverty.” The problem of homeless families has begun to worsen.

For now, the number of homeless in West Germany is relatively small--estimated at between 300,000 and 400,000 in a nation of 60 million--and the officials who deal with the problem say they do not expect the numbers to increase significantly unless there is a further sharp rise in unemployment.

Rich Country’s Concern

Still, for Europe’s richest country, which a decade ago hardly knew the word poverty, even these modest figures have triggered concern.

“It isn’t a problem of great numbers, but for those who are hit, it is a catastrophe,” said Bernhard Happe, an urban housing specialist at the Assn. of Germany Cities.

West Germany has extensive social welfare programs--rent supplements and low-cost public housing are among its liberal unemployment benefits--and this means that only those who are unaware of their rights or not interested in exercising them end up among the homeless.

In Italy, the plight of the homeless is somewhat confusing, partly because official statistics are not always reliable.

A survey by Censis, a Rome-based social study center, indicates that about 900,000 families are unable to pay their rent without some kind of help.

But there appears to be no reliable overall figures on the homeless because many families who appear on official records as having no home have found accommodations on their own.

In Europe as in the United States, many who deal with the homeless believe that what is needed is simply more public housing, along with more people working on the problem. But this means more money from governments already hard-pressed in the area of public welfare.

Therefore, most experts think there can be no real solution so long as the recession continues.

Times staff writers Stanley Meisler in Paris and Tyler Marshall in Bonn contributed to this article.