Housing First in Spain: from the street to the home
- Joan Uribe Vilarrodona
- Dec 1, 2015
- 3 min read
Editor’s note: We believe stories about local progress to end homelessness can inspire and spur new thinking. To that end, we’ll occasionally share guest posts about what your colleagues in other countries are doing to tackle homelessness, with contact information to allow you to follow up with authors directly. We are grateful to Joan Uribe Vilarrodona, Director in Saint John of God, Social Services, Barcelona, and professor at the University of Barcelona and researcher on GRECS (Research Group on Control and Social Exclusion, University of Barcelona), for the guest post below on how Housing First functions in Spain.
Housing First is synonymous with social innovation in working with people experiencing homelessness. Not only in Spain, but also in Europe, our model is more centered in the Staircase of Transition approach, based on the provision of residential and non-residential services to those who move forward in an "upwards progression" from service to service, with the often-unachieved objective of "leaving" the system of social protection because they don't need it anymore.
The Staircase of Transition is a model with certain advantages and disadvantages. But without a doubt the incorporation of Housing First, a model that only some European cities utilize, allows us to improve and better our work.
In Spain, the Barcelona City Council, Saint John of God Social Services and the SUARA Cooperative/Garbet Foundation are pioneering a pilot Housing First project accompanied by an in-depth study to evaluate the effectiveness in Spain's social, legal, geographic, and cultural context.
For us, Housing First is a true innovation. It could offer a chance to modify the current Staircase of Transition model, if evaluations demonstrate that the model is plausible or even possible in our context. But what is clear is the necessity of having a system based first and foremost in the Housing First philosophy--in a broad sense, responding to the needs of people experiencing homelessness and rights-based social support.
On the other hand, Housing First poses a series of challenges. There is the political challenge of taking on the fight for the right to housing; the challenge of accepting the necessity of giving predominant consideration to the Staircase of Transition; and the challenge for social service professionals to understand their role with people experiencing homelessness, not as authorities but as service providers.
It was out of a desire to understand and reflect on these challenges that the Barcelona City Council comissioned the study that resulted in the book From the street to the home: Housing First as a model of intervention and its application in Barcelona, published by Ediciones San Juan de Dios. The book proposes modifications to the Staircase of Transition model toward the Housing First model as the central approach toward solving homelessness.
It will be an interesting journey that, without doubt, will transform the reality of homelessness and help us transform societies and move them forward--as we hould have been doing from the beginning.
About the Author
Joan Uribe Vilarrodona, director of Sant Joan de Déu- Serveis Socials, Barcelona, an organization which has worked specifically with people experiencing homelessness since 1979, mediating intervention with residencies, inclusivity, Housing First, employment programs, awareness and research.
He has been the Spanish representative of the Consejo de Administración de FEANTSA (Federación Europea de Asociaciones Nacionales que trabajan con Personas Sin Hogar) since 2013.
He is a Doctor of Social Anthropology and a member of GRECS (Grupo de Investigación en Exclusión y Control Social) at the University of Barcelona.
Contact: joan.uribe@ub.edu.
Disclaimer: The opinions, representations and statements made within this guest article are those of the author and not of the Institute of Global Homelessness as a whole.
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