Use Empty Office Blocks To Solve Winter Homeless Shelter Crisis, Say Campaigners
Campaigners want empty commercial buildings to become makeshift shelters this winter as social distancing severely impacts the number of beds available for the expected “tsunami” of homelessness.
Outreach teams are predicting a sharp rise in the number of people sleeping rough due to a perfect storm of factors caused or exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic – not least, the end of both the eviction ban and the furlough scheme.
And with more space needed for Covid-secure shelters, innovative measures are being put forward to tackle the crisis, such as taking advantage of the empty office blocks and commercial buildings in town and city centres across the country.
Jon Glackin, founder of outreach group Streets Kitchen, told HuffPost UK: “We’re going to have to start thinking about unorthodox methods. There are lots of empty buildings that could be reappropriated and put to good use – that’s the simple answer.”
Glackin is no stranger to this. Two years ago Streets Kitchen took over an empty building in Islington, north London, for use as a winter shelter.
The economic toll of the pandemic, and the social distancing measures in place to tackle it, mean already stretched shelters will likely see more people asking for help, but be severely limited in how many they can take in.
Lucy Abraham, CEO of Glass Door Homeless Charity, told HuffPost UK: “The current advice is that accommodation with communal airspaces is not allowed because of the risk of the spread of Covid. So that means any shared night shelters, dormitory-style accommodation can’t operate under current government advice guidelines.
“Our normal service would be five night shelters on any one night of the winter, operating across London and we would normally accommodate 170 people every night.
“So our challenge now is what do we provide to people? And that’s not just us – there are thousands of night shelter places across the country.”
The coming ‘tsunami’
The government’s
