Vicious Circle
Emergency accommodation in Luxembourg is meant to last three months. Agostinho Martins and his three children have been living in Steinsel's emergency housing for nearly a year.
Martins is a single father. After the parents separated, the family was evicted from their previous home. He was not working at the time. Child benefit and dependency insurance for one of the children was not enough to cover rent. He found work for a period, but his employer retired, and he fell back on unemployment. Finding a new job that lets him care for his son has proved difficult.
The three-month limit was extended by another three months. Even that has long passed. The mayor of Steinsel, Manon Kolber, describes the situation as a vicious circle. The municipality does not want to throw anyone out, and cannot, because it would then be duty-bound to take them back in. What matters, she argues, is that the various actors work together to move people quickly into a different situation and out of emergency housing.
The social worker's association ANASIG says the Martins family is not an isolated case. Jean-Michel Campanella, vice-president of ANASIG, asks what happens to families who find nothing after three, six, or 12 months. They risk ending up on the street, or back in unfit accommodation, because essentially there is nothing ready or planned for them in terms of next steps.
The children's ombudsman (OKaJu) is acutely aware of the problem. Every week, the OKaJu team deals with housing cases. The core issue, in the ombudsman's view, is simply that there is not enough emergency housing. In one monitoring exercise, OKaJu counted between 50 and 70 families in emergency accommodation at any given time, with some staying far beyond the intended limit.
After emergency housing, there is a shortage of suitable options on the wider housing market, and of social housing for lower-income households. The pipeline is broken at every stage. Emergency shelter is temporary by definition, but the next step does not exist for many families.
The mayor calls it a vicious circle. ANASIG calls for better coordination. OKaJu points at the numbers. A single father of three calls it home, for now.