An investigation in Belgium regarding policies to combat homelessness.

This  is a case study  that I started to take interest in  as a student researching the policies that are put in place by states to aid the homeless. Indeed, with the birth of Samusocial which is emblematic, I think, of a certain "urgentist" vision of social policies, Belgium has taken to the problem of housing quite seriously. For the past ten years, the Brussels Region has not stopped practicing this thermometer policy by increasing the number of beds and thus the budgets. They have quadrupled in six years, in 2015 alone, we went from 4 to 9.5 million for homeless emergency policies of which Samusocial accounts for  90% and allocates more than half the total budget for the homelessness sector! This doesn’t  even count the 5 million Euros that the Region has just invested in a building for Samusocial who will pay no rent ...

This overbidding and overfunding that can give the illusion of a voluntarist policy, that has lead to an increasing number of beds in recent years, however, has never managed to properly legitimise the sector. With all the means at Samusocial, the policy of helping the homeless remains stuck in a humanitarian logic. There is a real investigation into the use of this money, the political stubbornness to continue the sterile social policies denounced by the whole industry and the non-investment in housing policies, which nevertheless more than demonstrated their efficiency and a very low budget.

-Zinedine