Denmark

Who are the Homeless?

It has been argued that the Scandinavian welfare model (see, for example, Esping-Andersen, 1990) prevents widespread poverty relatively well, especially when compared to the models of the United States or the United Kingdom, for example. Denmark provides a wide span of social measures—such as rent subsidies, welfare payments, old age and early retirement pensions—at a comparatively high standard. It offers these benefits to all citizens, regardless of where they reside or their degree of contact with the labor market, and it administers them not by the principles of the insurance industry but simply on the basis of legal residency in Denmark. With this model, the state has been able to limit the problems of poverty and homelessness; indeed, homelessness caused by inability to pay rent is almost nonexistent.

However, still some people are considered homeless. But it is a situation understood to be correlated more with social deviation than with housing policy, market forces, or poverty: The homeless population is understood to consist of people with a variety of [Page 114]personal problems in addition to having no permanent dwelling—such as excessive use of illegal drugs (see Stax, 2003) or alcohol, mental illness (see Brandt, 1992), or a combination of these and other problems (Järvinen, 1993; Koch-Nielsen & Stax, 1999; Stax, 1999). It is these personal troubles, perhaps compounded by housing issues, that are found to cause homelessness.

Organizing and Counting the Homeless

But while the housing situation has not been found to be of central importance in understanding the causes of homelessness in Danish research, it has played a significant role in categorizing the people considered homeless. Stax (2001) presented a typology of homelessness based on where they sleep, which, he argued, underlies the current Danish understanding of the phenomenon. He distinguished between people living on the streets, in shelters for those without a permanent place to stay, doubled up with friends or family, and in “special housing” arrangements—that is, those targeted toward people considered in need of permanent housing but not able to live in an ordinary, independent dwelling.

Notably, shelter standards in Denmark are high. Almost all shelters provide a single-occupancy room, spartanly furnished, with a lockable door, rather than the large-scale dormitories known in other countries. (In a few shelters, almost all located in Copenhagen, one might still find some double-occupancy rooms.) Moreover, shelters are open to tenants twenty-four hours a day.

Estimates of the homeless population have thus far been based on counts of shelter clients, since no scientifically based information on other groups is available—for example, people “sleeping rough” (i.e., sleeping outside) or living doubled up with others. Within the shelter population, however, some data have been gleaned since the late 1990s, when a national register with information on users of shelters was established.

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