Homelessness soars, creating tension, violence
RIO DE JANEIRO — One night about a year ago, Leandro Mota Generoso was sleeping on a street in downtown Rio de Janeiro when he felt something jagged strike his face.
Somebody — he didn’t see the person, but believes it was a resident in the neighborhood — had slashed his nose with broken glass from a Vodka bottle. He awoke in a pool of blood.
“I can’t sleep at night anymore,” said Generoso, 23, who has been homeless since the grandfather who was raising him died five years ago. “To many people, we are rats, garbage or whatever thing.”
A year after Rio de Janeiro hosted the Olympic Games, a grinding economic crisis has led to an influx of thousands of homeless people, creating a climate of tension that city officials are scrambling to address.
Warm temperatures and miles of beaches have long made Brazil’s most famous city a place with a large street population. But city officials say it’s more than tripled in the past few years, to an estimated 15,000 people.
While many U.S. cities have experienced sharp increases in people living outdoors thanks to rising housing prices amid a recovering economy, in Rio the driving factors have been fallout from Brazil’s worst recession in decades and long-standing inequalities.
“Rio de Janeiro is facing the worst possible scenario when it comes to the homeless,” said Pedro Fernandes, the city’s secretary of social assistance and human rights. “We have never had such a large number in the streets.”
Tensions have been steadily increasing, particularly in affluent and touristy neighborhoods where residents and businesses are frustrated with the throngs of people sleeping on the streets. In August, a residential building in the iconic Copacabana neighborhood installed sprinklers below its awnings to rouse unwanted campers below. The city later forced the sprinklers to be removed.
People in several affluent neighborhoods post messages on community Facebook groups urging police to act and imploring neighbors not to feed the homeless.
In some cases, violence has erupted. Forty-yearold Fernanda Rodrigues dos Santos was fatally shot in the chest while sleeping in the street in Copacabana in October. Police say 24-year-old Rodrigo Gomes Rodrigues, a medical student who lives in the neighborhood, has confessed to the killing. Police say he and a friend argued earlier in the night with another homeless person, went to get a gun and returned looking for revenge.
The city has launched an initiative to spruce up shelters and persuade more homeless people to use them. Many shun shelters because they often have strict rules and, by the city’s own acknowledgment, have fallen into disrepair, with infestations of bugs and filthy bathrooms.
While some of the nearly 2,200 beds in shelters go empty each night, successfully persuading more homeless people to use them could create its own problems, as there are vastly more potential users than space for them. Given that reality, the city is also working to help migrants return to their home states, and in some cases even other countries.