I sat and watched the ARD 8 PM news, and it came to a short report on the state of homelessness in Germany. The SPD-led government has issued the first ever report on official numbers of homeless people in Germany.
So, there are around five interesting from this report:
1. Most of the homeless are men. No one really details this or explains it.
2. Most are German citizens, or you are told this. How they came to the citizenship thing....is unknown.
3. There are 3 categories of homelessness listed. One is for this those in a program shelter. The second are people staying with friends or relatives. The third are the people who just live off the street or in city parks.
4. Total in Germany? 263,000. Of this group....around 37,000 are the third category folks....living truly off the streets.
5. Somewhere in the mix....around half the people admit to some health condition or disability, with a quarter of this group being addicted to 'something' (booze, drugs, etc).
Problems with this report? If you look over the presentation, you come to three issues.
First, none of this is broken down into the sixteen states or urban centers. Just in the Frankfurt area, if you walk around....there's no doubt that 2,500 people are homeless and mostly in a 2-km circle of the train station.
Second, a lot of round numbers thrown into the report, and I'd question the facts, and how they arrived at their numbers.
Third, if you wanted to fix any of this....you'd have to force people into rehab. That's something I just don't think the majority of them want.
In the case of the drug addicts....I might go and suggest that the majority of them....addicted already by age 20....probably won't survive to age 50. They are all living shorter lives in some fashion.
As for some program to fix all of this? It would appear that the SPD-Green-FDP government will create some program to fund.....but I wouldn't have high expectations.
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