A homeless person sleeping outdoors in Munich in Germany. | Photo: Keystone/Raimund Kutter

The homeless lead a precarious life and are even being overlooked by academia, wrote the independent Harvard Magazine in April 2024, noting that current research on the topic is inadequate. Harvard has been home to an Initiative on Health and Homelessness since 2019, and it’s been attracting more and more students. Its director Howard Koh is insistent, however, that “Homelessness is undermining the very fabric of our society”. In one of the few studies conducted on the topic, back in 2018, Jill Roncarati found that the death rate among the homeless in Boston was ten times higher than among the general population. A large-scale survey was conducted in California last year – which is where roughly a third of homeless people in the USA live – and it showed that two-thirds of them display symptoms of mental health problems, and almost half describe their physical health as poor.

“Homelessness is undermining the very fabric of our society”.Howard Koh

As Koh explains, it’s difficult to obtain funding for such research in the USA. A large proportion of public health studies is supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and while they have an immense annual budget of USD 45 billion, homelessness doesn’t really fit in there. Researchers can receive NIH funding if they set up studies on diseases that affect homeless people – like diabetes or addiction – but such studies only provide an incomplete picture of the overall problem.

There are also gaps in Swiss research into homelessness, as was made evident by the platform Sozialinfo.ch in 2020. A national report had just been published under the auspices of the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland (FHNW). Using extrapolation models, the report calculated that there are some 1,000 to 2,000 people in Switzerland who are homeless. In Germany, too, the Federal Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs has only been collecting reliable figures on homelessness since 2022. Two smaller Swiss studies were conducted by Matthias Drilling and Jörg Dittmann in 2022 and 2023 respectively. And the FHNW has meanwhile set up a team to investigate the topic of homelessness that is open to research ideas and advice.

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