The Framing Problem: How Germany Talks About Homelessness

Framing—the strategic use of language to shape how the public perceives an issue—has taken hold of almost every critical debate in Germany. Nowhere is this more glaring than in discussions about homelessness, a crisis of growing, visible misery in our cities that rarely receives the serious attention it demands. And when it does, the debate is too often conducted in the language of guilt and individual conscience.

I live in Berlin, where an estimated 56,000 people are thought to be without a home, with approximately 10,000 sleeping rough on the streets. The effects are plain to see: not a single subway ride goes by without someone begging. There is hardly a bridge in the inner city that hasn’t become a makeshift sleeping camp, hardly a park where someone isn’t sleeping on a bench or relieving themselves in the bushes. Berlin is no exception. Hamburg, Frankfurt, and even smaller towns that were once picturesque have all become familiar with this picture. Official estimates speak of at least 700,000 people across Germany who lack a safe and permanent residence.

It goes without saying that these numbers represent personal tragedies. Living without the ability to retreat to privacy is hellish, and the sight of people sleeping rough has contributed to a widespread sense of diminished safety in our cities.

Given the scale of the problem, one would expect an urgent debate about solutions. Instead, we are confronted with moralistic admonitions aimed at our conscience. Consider a recent podcast titled “Can We Abolish Homelessness?”, produced by the government’s Agency for Civic Education (Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung). It opens with the moderator confessing that he once harboured prejudices against homeless people: “I thought, they just drink, they’re unkempt and don’t even want to work.” Though the programme eventually mentions that the root cause is a lack of affordable housing, its emphasis is squarely on campaigning for greater public empathy. The implicit message: if homelessness is a problem, then people’s attitudes toward the homeless are an even bigger one.

This is no outlier. Surveying mainstream coverage, one gets the distinct impression that pro-government voices have settled for presenting it as something citizens must simply learn to accept—and stop complaining about, since complaints are indistinguishable from prejudice. This moralising tone is amplified further when homelessness is linked to other issues, such as, for example, climate change or racism. 

Reports on homelessness reliably spike each summer during heatwaves. “Heat Danger for Homeless People—How You Can Help,” ran a headline from the public broadcaster NDR last July, declaring that “we are all duty-bound to act” and urging readers to offer a bottle of water or dial the emergency services. In a similar vein, a state-sponsored NGO, normally dedicated to the fight against racism, warns solemnly of “group-related hatred” against homeless people, describing the hostility and violence they face—without providing a single statistic on how widespread this alleged hatred actually is. The message, again, is clear: homelessness is primarily a problem of attitudes.

That is a deeply inadequate—and dishonest—way to frame the issue. It follows a depressingly familiar pattern in which political failures are laid at the feet of ordinary citizens, while any pressure directed at those actually in power is dismissed as unfair or unseemly.

It is also untrue that ordinary citizens are cold-hearted. Nobody takes pleasure in seeing someone visibly unwell slumped in a doorway, particularly as winter closes in. You would need a heart of stone to remain unmoved by the stories that occasionally surface: a homeless man crushed to death inside a waste truck, having sought shelter in a paper-recycling bin; another killed in an underground car park because the driver simply couldn’t see him sleeping in the dark. Of course, the ubiquity of urban misery has had a brutalising effect. People do look away and try to make peace with what they feel they cannot change. The desensitisation is real—but it is a symptom, not the cause. Even if every one of us consistently acted as a Good Samaritan, we would not, as individuals, solve homelessness. That is precisely why it was so wrong when a journalist chairing a recent Berlin television debate on the subject told his audience that it was “too easy” to blame politicians. On the contrary, generating public guilt has become the most convenient way for politicians to distract from their own failures—failures they no longer even pretend to believe they can remedy.

This is all the more troubling because workable solutions—albeit in a smaller country—do exist. Some years ago, there were reports about Finland, which had successfully tackled homelessness through a simple strategy called “Housing First.” Rather than requiring homeless people to resolve addictions or other problems before being allocated housing—the conventional wisdom at the time—the Finnish approach recognised the obvious: people can only begin to address their problems once they have a stable home. The government therefore committed to providing every homeless person with basic, functional accommodation. It worked. 

Housing First has since gained support in Germany too. But the policy failures that stand in its way are staggering. Germany currently lacks an estimated 800,000 housing units—some sources put the figure as high as 1.4 million. This shortage is not new. Yet rather than creating conditions conducive to construction, successive governments have made the problem worse. Strict climate-protection regulations aimed at achieving net-zero by 2045, protracted planning processes, and an ever-expanding bureaucracy have conspired to stifle the housing market. For all the official rhetoric about caring for the poor, their interests have been sacrificed on the altar of energy-efficiency targets and green ideology.

Then there is the question of mass migration. Reliable figures are hard to come by—the authorities do not systematically record the nationality of rough sleepers—but reports suggest a significant proportion are non-German citizens. In the past two decades, Germany’s population has grown by several million, due entirely to migration. Even if most have found flats, often with state help, the resulting pressure on affordable housing—of which Berlin still had an abundance in the early 2000s—has been devastating for the country’s poorest residents. The state has invested considerable sums: Berlin alone spends between €350 and €400 million annually on emergency shelters and housing assistance. Yet the numbers sleeping rough keep rising—and the debate about why remains largely taboo. A growing number of citizens, however, perceive a fundamental imbalance: too many people admitted without any serious plan on how to mitigate the negative effects. 

Symbolic gestures—such as Berlin’s Green-run local authority allegedly spending €56,000 a year on a unisex eco public toilet at Kottbusser Tor (a hotspot for homelessness), later forced to close due to a rat infestation—have come to crystallise, for many, just how detached certain quarters of government have become from reality.

The rise in homelessness is one of the most visible symptoms of Germany’s broader social and economic decline. It is the product of political fatalism—a governing class that has chosen to manage decline rather than reverse it. 

It was not always thus. In the post-war period, facing a shortage of millions of homes, the government of 1950 responded with decisive intervention: a legislative framework that financed the construction of 3.3 million homes within a single decade, supplemented by a further 2.7 million built by private investors. The severe housing crisis of the early 1950s was resolved within a decade.

We live in different times. But the principle remains: a country that cannot house its people is a country losing its grip. When politics treats one of the most pressing social crises of our age as either an unavoidable fate or a problem of insufficient compassion, you can be sure the crisis will not improve. It will get worse.