DOES THIS GIRL LOOK HOMELESS TO YOU? The growing crisis affecting women like you
Think life on the streets, think man in a doorway with a dog? Think again. Cosmopolitan’s AMY GRIER investigates the growing crisis enveloping the under-35s
Alone on the first truly dark and cold night of autumn, I’m fighting with my Google Maps. It’s telling me the homeless shelter that I’m trying to find is in the middle of the abandoned haulage yard to my left. There are no lights on. No signs of life. Huge freight containers and empty lorry carriages cast an even deeper canopy of shadow. If we were in a Guy Ritchie movie, this is where they’d take you to get whacked. At the base of the yard, there’s a blue and white sign nailed to a corrugated iron wall. Google Maps one, Amy, nil.
Inside the heavily reinforced door it smells like your best memory of school dinners. There are two beaten-up brown sofas and one big TV. Four people are clustered around the two old-school desktop computers they share between 44, but most are sat around the five big round tables tucking into salmon curry, vegetables and rice. A cheer goes up as someone takes a great shot at the pool table. This is Shelter From The Storm, a free emergency night shelter in Islington, north London. It’s funded only by donations, and provides a bed and two meals as well as volunteers, who stay up overnight to keep watch. Think it’s full of rough sleepers and the unemployed? Not so. Over 30% of the people here have jobs, but are still homeless.
I’m here to meet Adriana*. She’s a 36-yearold qualified lawyer from Nigeria who was evicted from her flat almost a year ago when her landlady filed for bankruptcy and didn’t tell her. Too ashamed to admit to her sister, who lives in Essex, she couldn’t afford the deposit and agency fees on a new place, and was out on the streets.
Sitting on a threadbare throw-covered sofa in the office upstairs, she tells me her story. After lobbying her council to help her, only to be told “You don’t look homeless. Nice make-up, by the way” on one occasion, and “Come back in eight weeks, you might be pregnant by then” on another, she slept on a friend’s sofa for two months. But when that goodwill ran out, she roamed the streets at night. The warehouse she was working at downsized, and she lost her job, then she started sleeping in the reception of her local police station before being referred to this mixed shelter. In two weeks, she starts a new job as a care worker for the elderly. Until then, she’ll spend her days reading The
Guardian in the local library. Libraries are good places if you’re homeless. They’re warm, quiet (although the staff wake you if you sleep) and free. Big train and bus stations are the same, as are shopping centres.
“Homelessness can get you if you’re rich or poor. One crisis is all it takes. It puts
“One crisis is all it takes. It puts your life on hold”
everything in your life on hold. I’m in my thirties: one day I want a family and a home, but how can you date when you’re living in a night shelter sharing a dorm with 15 other women?”
I know what you’re thinking: Adriana is an outlier, an exception. She’s not. When I started researching this story four months ago, I thought I knew what I’d find – but the new face of homelessness looks nothing like you expect it to. It looks like you or me, young people who are going places, but might, without you even realising, also have no place to go.
Out of sight
Homelessness has risen 54% since 2010**, and although local government street counts in 2015 put the number of people sleeping rough in England at 3,569 (up 30% from 2014)†, research from Crisis actually suggests that it’s far greater, once you consider there are closer to 380,000 ‘hidden homeless’ people in the UK – those not on the street or processed by their local council. They could be sofa surfers, in B&Bs or hostels, or the growing number of people currently spending the night on the Tube or night bus (the number of which has increased by 121% over the last four years† †). And it affects young women more than men.“Women are less likely to sleep rough for obvious safety reasons,” says Kate Webb, head of policy at Shelter. “In that way they become really, really good at concealing themselves.” It means she could be that girl on the bus with a backpack, the colleague who is always in first and out last, that girl in Pret nursing the same cup of coffee for an hour. Within this, there is an even more specific sub-group of people. Those who are homeless, but not deemed homeless enough to legally be entitled to help. This was a refrain that came up again and again from the women I spoke to. If you’re single, under 35, without children, and not deemed ‘vulnerable,’ you’re on your own. “People at the start of their career and living independently for the first time are now one of the most at-risk groups,” Webb told me. That’s because our government allocates homeless support based on something called ‘priority need.’ Quite rightly, it says those with children, domestic abuse issues, severe mental health problems or who are pregnant should be homed. The problem is, at a time of sustained cuts to local councils and with a nationwide shortage of affordable or social housing, that means the growing numbers of those who are homeless – yet not in ‘priority need’ – get nothing. There are no precise figures on this as it’s a new phenomenon, but anecdotally the charities – over eight of the main ones – I’ve spoken to say that this crisis adversely affects millennials. First of all, the shame around it makes them more likely to stay hidden, preferring to make do on friends’ sofas, public transport or backpacker hostels. Secondly, this is an age group of people that the powers
“I had to take a suitcase into work. All I had was in that bag”
that be assume can seek shelter in a family home, if all else fails. But what if the family downsizes? Or is nowhere near where the jobs are? Or breaks down?
One night, over a year ago now, Diana* made the brave decision to leave her family home. “I’m Muslim, and my mum in particular had been getting steadily more conservative for years. I was allowed to go to university, but had to live at home the entire time – travelling nearly three hours across London every day each way to get there and back. I’m 26 now, and I had a 5pm curfew.” Things escalated. If someone she knew from college said hello to her in the street, she’d be verbally abused and not allowed out of the house. Her parents would call and harass her friends. She got a job, but they wanted to know where she was every minute of every day.“The last straw came when they threatened to kill me. I went to stay at a friend’s house, and I never went back.”
She spent the next 10 months sleeping on various friends’ sofas, all the while holding down different jobs as an assistant on make-up counters.“I had to pull my suitcase into work a few times, but people would assume I was going on holiday, or I’d tell them I was moving house. They didn’t know everything I had was in that bag.”
Diana, like Adriana, was in the Catch-22 position of not being homeless enough to get help. As she was not actually sleeping on the street, she was sent away. Because they’re so overstretched, it can be a challenge to persuade the council you’re vulnerable enough to get help. It was only by appealing to them with help from Shelter, and showing the threat of domestic violence, that they accepted their duty to house Diana.
Others don’t even get that. Something called ‘intentional homelessness’ means councils don’t always make an exception if your home included the threat of violence or a creepy landlord. Or if you got a job that took you away from your support network – but you couldn’t afford a deposit in your new city. Or even if you moved out to avoid debt, because the ‘shared accommodation rate’ housing benefit under-35s get doesn’t cover the rent (Shelter says around 70% of areas now have a shortfall).
Desperate times
If you saw Cristina (above) walking down the street, with her long dark hair pulled into a messy bun, Nike hoodie and owl back-pack, you’d think she was just out of college. You’d never know she was actually nearly 25 years old. Or that she spent a year living out of a car with a man who abused her. That she’d been in prison. That she used to be addicted to a cocktail of drugs, including heroin, to help her deal with untreated mental health issues caused by an abusive childhood.
Still, you probably wouldn’t have seen her sleeping rough. Because, she tells me when we meet at St Mungo’s homeless shelter in King’s Cross, she was living in a car and stealing from Marks & Spencer to eat.“Being homeless is terrifying. You’re always thinking about what immediate danger you’re in. I stayed with an abusive boyfriend just to have someone there to protect me.” Eventually, when she ended up in hospital following a sexual assault, Cristina was given a place at a women’s refuge and from there, after dealing with her substance abuse issues, was referred to St Mungo’s.
She opens her backpack and pulls out a copy of self-help tome The Rules Of Life by Richard ›
Templar. “I missed lots of school, so now I read as many books as I can. I used to speak like, ‘Wagwan, alright yeah.’ Now, I sit in on the directors’ meetings at St Mungo’s and run confidence workshops.
So what’s the future for women like Cristina, Adriana and Diana? The new Homelessness Reduction Bill, potentially the first new piece of homelessness legislation in 40 years, could have the answer. Conservative MP for Harrow East Bob Blackman, the man championing the bill, tells me “if it passes, up to 56 days before you become homeless, you can go to the council and receive support. You will not be turned away, regardless of your need status.”
All of the charities I speak to are behind it, but there’s also a sense it doesn’t go far enough. The intentions are good, but when you stack them against other issues – the scrapping of housing benefit for 18- to 21-year-olds in April next year, for example, the national shortage of affordable housing and the gulf between what you can earn or claim as an under-35 and market rent – millennials are still clearly at risk.
It’s nearly midnight when I leave Adriana at Shelter From The Storm. I hop on a bus. At the back, a young woman sits in a navy coat, almost nodding off, her hand tightly gripping the handle of a wheeled suitcase. Four months ago, I would have assumed she was just off a late flight, but now, I’m really not so sure.