In February 2024, under the cover of night, an army of officers and volunteers set out across Poland with one goal: to count people. The results flow into ministerial spreadsheets, officials check off the task as completed, and society breathes a sigh of relief, seeing stable figures in the statistics. The problem is that these numbers—though mathematically correct—are semantically empty. The support system behind them is, in many aspects, a facade: it generates reports but fails to restore people's dignity.
When we hear that a person in crisis refuses help, it's easy to judge: 'they wanted this.' That's a convenient lie. Refusing a place in a shelter is rarely a whim. It's usually a rational response to an offer that, instead of solving the problem, only proposes institutionalizing poverty.
Statistics that hide the truth
Let's look at the National Survey of Homeless People with a critical eye. We are dealing with a classic methodological problem here. A 'point-in-time' survey is a snapshot of one specific night. This approach is fraught with significant cognitive bias.
- Territorial inequality: The survey result directly depends on the activity of services in a given region. If in one municipality, a patrol limits itself to driving around the main streets, and in another, volunteers enter every abandoned building, we get data that cannot be reliably compared. The map of homelessness becomes a map of patrol activity, not the actual distribution of the problem.
- The invisible: Statistics excellently index people in shelters—because they are in the system. People living in gazebos, on staircases, or in forests often remain off the radar.
- Lack of dynamics: The table in the report is static. It does not show the flow of people. It does not tell us how many people have just fallen out of the system and how many have been stuck in it for decades. We treat a dynamic phenomenon with a static tool, leading to incorrect conclusions when designing social policy.
Homelessness is not a character trait. It is a life situation. By trying to measure it solely by the number of occupied beds in shelters, we measure the system's capacity, not the scale of human drama.
'Do you need help?'
The most dramatic element of the Polish approach to homelessness is not the dry data, but the quality of the help offered.
Imagine a person at a train station. A patrol approaches. The sacrament question is asked: 'Do you want to go to a shelter?'. The person answers: 'No.' The system notes: Refusal of help. Case closed.
But what really lies behind this 'no'? The offer of a shelter is often a proposal to give up one's subjectivity. It means entering a mode of life where one is a number in a register, sleeping in a room with a dozen strangers, often in conditions that violate privacy. It is a proposal for managed vegetation.
The Polish social support system has mastered keeping people alive (warm soup, a place to sleep) but fails at reintegrating them into society. Shelters act as buffer zones—storing people rejected by the labor market and the housing market. Refusing such 'help' is often a desperate attempt to maintain some control over one's life, even at the cost of freezing.
There are alternatives
If the current model is ineffective, what do we propose instead? The solution is known and tested, among others, in Finland. It is called Housing First.
The traditional 'ladder' model assumes that a homeless person must 'earn' housing: first a night shelter, then a shelter, then a training apartment, and finally—if all goes well—a social housing unit. This is a path through suffering, where most people drop out.
The Housing First model reverses this logic. It assumes that housing is a human right and the basis for solving other problems. First, we provide a stable roof over one's head—unconditionally—and only then introduce therapeutic and vocational support. A person who has their own key to a door regains a sense of agency. Only with a safe base can they think about treating addictions or finding a job.
Homelessness is a state of lack of housing resources, not a state of mind that needs to be 'cured' with lectures in a community center.
The paradox of empty buildings
This brings us to the crux of the systemic criticism. Homelessness in 21st-century Poland does not result from a physical lack of housing. It results from their distribution. We have hundreds of thousands of empty buildings in Poland—apartments held speculatively as capital investments, 'concrete gold' that stands empty while people freeze on the streets.
The market allocates housing where there is profit (investment apartments, short-term rentals), not where there is the greatest social need. This is a classic example of market failure, which, in pursuit of profitability, ignores social costs.
As a society, we must understand that the fight against homelessness is not a matter of charity but of rational economic policy. The cost of maintaining a person in the system of shelters, hospitals, and police interventions is often higher than the cost of providing them with cheap municipal housing.
As long as the Ministry considers Excel reports a success and the refusal to vegetate in a shelter a 'free choice,' we will remain at a deadlock. The real fight against homelessness does not take place at night with a flashlight in an abandoned building. It takes place in the debate about the right to housing, the regulation of real estate speculation, and whether the state should serve citizens or developers.
