São Paulo reportedly plans homeless camp following 30% rise in rough sleepers
Homeless population in city of 12 million grew rapidly during the pandemic, in what activists say is a humanitarian emergency
Latin America’s largest city, São Paulo, is reportedly planning to open a campsite for rough sleepers in response to a Covid-fuelled homelessness crisis that has forced thousands on to the streets.
The homeless population in Brazil’s economic capital, which has about 12 million residents, grew by more than 30% during the coronavirus pandemic in what activists have called a humanitarian emergency.
On Saturday morning one of São Paulo’s 31,000-plus homeless residents stood outside the city’s Museum of Sacred Art with a tatty sign that spoke to the scale of the social catastrophe. “Estou comendo do lixo,” it read. “I’m eating from the trash.”
According to a report in one local newspaper on Monday, the city hall is now planning to create a campground where São Paulo’s homeless can erect tents and be given access to bathroom and laundry facilities. “The mayor has said that, given the acuteness of the city’s circumstances, money would not be an obstacle,” the city’s new human rights and citizenship secretary, Soninha Francine, told the Folha de São Paulo.
Francine said it was an emergency that so many families were having to sleep rough because they could no longer afford to pay rent or for cooking gas.
Official statistics reveal a dramatic situation in Brazil’s biggest city: according to São Paulo’s city hall, there were people living in tents and wooden shacks in nearly 6,800 different areas last year, compared with only about 2,000 two years earlier. Their inhabitants reportedly include a growing number of women, families and elderly citizens.