{"id":26953,"date":"2025-11-27T23:10:37","date_gmt":"2025-11-27T21:10:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.liberalglobe.com\/?p=26953"},"modified":"2025-11-27T23:10:37","modified_gmt":"2025-11-27T21:10:37","slug":"a-tsunami-of-new-poor-people-sweeps-through-germany","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.liberalglobe.com\/?p=26953","title":{"rendered":"A &#8220;tsunami&#8221; of new poor people sweeps through Germany"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The latest government report on homelessness in Germany has caused great concern. Published at the beginning of the year, it showed that 531,600 people were without permanent housing in 2024, either rented or owned.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">This is an increase of almost 100% compared to the previous government estimate, three years ago. At the time, the German Ministry of Housing, Urban Development and Buildings attributed the phenomenon to a lack of sufficient data in the 2022 report.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But according to the organization \u201cFederal Association for Help for the Homeless\u201d (BAGW), even the new, disappointing official figures are incomplete.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In a study presented at its recently concluded national conference in Berlin, it paints an even bleaker picture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>1,029,000 people were homeless last year.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>About 0.84% \u200b\u200bof the population.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Of these, around 56,000 were living on the streets.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>The rest were staying in shelters, social institutions or on the couches of acquaintances. According to BAGW data, these are people of all ages.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>74% are adults. In their ranks, men (61%) clearly outnumber women (39%).<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Children and young people under the age of 18 make up 26% of the registered homeless population.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>That is, 264,000 minors did not live in their own apartment or that of their guardians in 2024.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>By far the most affected group is that of refugees and immigrants, with people without German citizenship making up 81% of all homeless people, while 20% of the total were naturalized citizens.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The reason for homelessness is not only unemployment &#8211; many of the homeless are employed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Rent and energy debts, disputes and conflicts in the place of residence, separations, divorces and changing residence are listed by BAGW among the most common reasons that lead people to homelessness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Armies of the newly poor<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">There is a reason why the figures in the government report and those of the BAGW organization differ so much.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">This is due to different research methods and the difficulty of accurately recording the real number of those living on the streets, as well as the so-called \u201chidden\u201d homeless people who move from one shelter to another.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So what the BAGW did was to include the percentage of \u201cinvisible\u201d homelessness. In Germany, it turns out, it affects about half a million people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In the background is the cost of living crisis, shrinking incomes and the impoverishment of an increasingly large part of the population, increases in rents and a lack of affordable housing, continuous cuts to the welfare state. The figures from the German Federal Statistical Office speak for themselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>From around 11% in the 1990s, today 15-17% of Germans are on the poverty line.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Around 4.2 million people lived in households last year that had serious problems paying their bills, such as electricity and gas.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>A third of the population does not even have money set aside for \u201cunforeseen expenses\u201d.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>In Germany, this means amounts of up to 1,250 euros.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It is an unimaginable amount for the many &#8211; low-wage earners, but also middle-income earners &#8211; who see their monthly salary disappear before the month is even over, covering increased spending on basic necessities: rent, energy bills and food. There is no need to save.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">This means that even small extraordinary expenses can put them in a dire situation. Not coincidentally, there is a high demand for microloans, under 1,000 euros.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">From a fifth (20.4%) of all loans they represented in 2020, last year they accounted for almost 50%, with more and more households sinking into debt.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Scraping the bottom of the barrel<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">From January 2026, the coalition government under Chancellor Friedrich Merz is proceeding with a reform of the welfare \u201cCitizen\u2019s Allowance\u201d (B\u00fcrgergeld) &#8211; \u201cMinimum Guaranteed Income\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In practice, it involves reducing benefits, affecting 5.5 million citizens, unemployed and employed. The new measures range from stricter penalties for refusing to work or missing appointments to a cap on housing subsidies. Merz talks about saving five billion euros a year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Critics of the plan &#8211; and there are many &#8211; warn of the risk of increasing the number of homeless people, especially among vulnerable groups, such as families with children, pregnant women and people with disabilities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Meanwhile, the ruling center-right Christian Union (Christian Democrats and Bavarian Christian Socialists) has now developed an appetite for pensions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Its youth wing (JU) has risen up against the bill that the government wants to pass to guarantee pensions until 2031 at 48% of the net salary that each insured person received as a worker.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The JU has 18 members of parliament in the Bundestag. The governing coalition has a majority of only 12 seats.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">If the 18 persist in their threat to vote against the bill, the only salvation for the Merz government would be support from opposition parties.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Both scenarios would cause great turmoil within the coalition, with an uncertain outcome, even for the long-term survival of the governing coalition in Berlin. The far right, meanwhile, is lurking.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The rising cost of living has hit young people without savings, families and the elderly particularly hard. It has increased loneliness, despair and dissatisfaction with democracy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The latest government report on homelessness in Germany has caused great concern. Published at the beginning of the year, it showed that 531,600 people&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[818,390],"tags":[7587,25,489,6207,4383,5290,989],"class_list":["post-26953","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-europe","category-politics","tag-bagw","tag-eu","tag-germany","tag-high-cost-of-living","tag-homeless","tag-housing-crisis","tag-poverty"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.liberalglobe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26953","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.liberalglobe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.liberalglobe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.liberalglobe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.liberalglobe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=26953"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.liberalglobe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26953\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26955,"href":"https:\/\/www.liberalglobe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26953\/revisions\/26955"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.liberalglobe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=26953"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.liberalglobe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=26953"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.liberalglobe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=26953"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}