Homelessness is on the rise in Buenos Aires

[Dim Witty]

Anecdotally I'll say I've noticed fewer homeless than in winter 2024 which was really a bad situation. It was very noticeable then, several homeless people sleeping inside the subte stations, guys sleeping in the doorway next to my building etc. Don't see so much of that nowadays

That's because the police (on orders from Mayor Macri), chase them away from "nice" neighborhoods.

 

[Ries]

Not my experience. I live near a very tony strip of Arroyo. Yesterday I saw 2 police bantering jovially with three pretty scruffy guys who were digging thru a dumpster, and they evidently knew each other pretty well. There are beat cops all over my neighborhood, and in the last few years I saw them interacting with force just once with a street dude- and he was obviously pretty intoxicated and semi-violent.
They normally have a pretty diplomatic relationship with the villa 31 guys, with definite lines of behaviour, of course.

 

[Silvie]

There are definitely more homeless people in Buenos Aires now. I live and work in Retiro, and there are noticeably more than last year.

Los Angeles and Buenos Aires are approximately the same size, both in population and in area.
LA has around 72,000 homeless this year, BA, 5000.
So, it could be worse.
A lot worse.

Unlike LA, where I lived for a decade, the homeless here are usually pretty polite, not drunkenly screaming obscenities, dying of drug overdoses in front of your favorite cafe, or defecating on the buses and subways.
Certainly, there is a bit more petty crime, but again, it could be a lot worse.
Many restaurants and bakeries in my neighborhood routinely give the homeless day old food, or free bottles of water.
And, at least the homeless here can forage in the garbage, and make a little money.
In the US, most dumpsters are padlocked shut.

The Villas have historically served to mitigate outright homelessness, but things are getting so bad here that they are no longer working as well in that capacity.
Where is Juan B Justo when we need him?
Starting around 1905 Juan B Justo and other leftists and socialists got the Argentine government to build a lot of housing for the poor and working class. They also just built a lot themselves, working with charities, the church, and donations.
Most of these were cooperativas, partly owned by the occupants.

The ones that occasionally try to sleep and pee at the entrance of my building are quite obscene; not polite at all. I notice that sometimes people try to talk to them but they don’t want to leave. One mentally ill girl burned her mattress at the entrance - this was a few years ago. When Jorge Macri came, he promised there would be no more mattresses in the streets and that those people would be taken to special institutions that they had created in CABA for medical and psychological treatment but I guess it isn’t so easy to convince them to go

 

[Neil]

The ones that occasionally try to sleep and pee at the entrance of my building are quite obscene; not polite at all. I notice that sometimes people try to talk to them but they don’t want to leave. One mentally ill girl burned her mattress at the entrance - this was a few years ago. When Jorge Macri came, he promised there would be no more mattresses in the streets and that those people would be taken to special institutions that they had created in CABA for medical and psychological treatment but I guess it isn’t so easy to convince them to go

And this is why more and more buildings are putting up a barrier in their entrances ,to prevent just that.

 

[Utopos]

This may be a bit off-topic. Or not:

It has gotten much more difficult over the last few years for people earning pesos. Two of our adult children (employed by different companies) have not had a raise in salary since mid 2024. Neither has gotten an alguinaldo the last two Decembers either, as they were supposed to. Our other son, a bus driver, has not been paid anything since early November. Now the bus company has folded so he's jobless with no back pay. Their spouses all work full time, but earn far less than necessary for the most basic of subsistence. It is truly frightening what would happen to them without us.

Also, there is a hidden kind of homelessness, where multiple generations of extended family live together tight quarters solely out of necessity.. I know several personally, where adult children (with children) have had to move back to a parents/cousins/aunts(!) household due to job loss and/or medical bills. To say it is cramped is understatement. I know of 2 nearby families with young children recently evicted onto the street (eviction is easier these days) - dad lost his job in one case, now they are "camping" in the garage of a kind neighbor.

I live in Zona Oeste, not CABA, and rarely see mattresses as living quarters. Sadly, that actually surprises me.

 

[Quilombo]

I've lived/worked downtown since the early 2010s, and stay there now when visiting friends and family and I've never seen it this bad.

I asked my husband after COVID if he remembered there being this many homeless people and he said he didn't think so, and by the time we moved we both agreed it had gotten particularly bad around where we lived. It had gone to one guy on our street in 2023 to 8 within a few yards of the entrance to our building and a guy who'd sleep on our stoop. He never bothered us, and was always gone by the morning so we had nothing to complain about, but the explosion of poverty felt empirically true, and now there seems to be some numbers backing it up.

If you're wondering why, it's important to remember the generous Argentine state gives unemployed people without children a whopping $78,000 ARS via the Volver al Trabajo social plan (which requires 70% attendance to "skills classes" to keep), so, it's easy to see why people are homeless because you can't even pay for groceries for a single adult, and how are you supposed to attend a class when you literally live on the street and are starving.

Things are bad and are only going to get worse, because the above mentioned program is apparently going to be completely libertarianized by Milei into a training only program, so, I'm sure that will help with petty theft and homelessness when people can't even buy chipa. You know, bootstraps and all that...

 

[MilHojas]

Social drama: Argentina's homeless crisis

Number of people living on streets increased by 30% in Buenos Aires City over last year; Economic and mental health problems in the capital.

www.batimes.com.ar

 

[Macanudo]

I also think that Milei's gutting of the rent control and tenant laws 2 years ago had a far bigger effect on homelessness, as many people I know had their rents double or triple when he changed the regulations.
Some moved in with aging parents, some shared apartments when previously they had their own places, some moved out of the city, to cheaper places.
There was a recorded bump in homelessness right after the rent law change, in 2023, percentage wise about as big as in the last year.

Remember that while overall inflation is calculated based on a basket of products and services, rents went up by something like 300% at that time, and lower raises in, say, the cost of carne or coca cola masked that in the overall inflation rate.

From my experience rents did not go up at all after Milei changed the regulations. Yes, expenses have gone up in some cases 300%, health insurance also 300%. But an apartment that rented for $600 a month a few years ago, still rents for about the same today for a new tenant. Four months ago I posted that an owner that I used to rent from had a one bedroom rental in Recoleta listed on the market owner direct for USD 600 plus expenses.

 

[Ries]

From my experience rents did not go up at all after Milei changed the regulations. Yes, expenses have gone up in some cases 300%, health insurance also 300%. But an apartment that rented for $600 a month a few years ago, still rents for about the same today for a new tenant. Four months ago I posted that an owner that I used to rent from had a one bedroom rental in Recoleta listed on the market owner direct for USD 600 plus expenses.

Six hundred dollars a month? 70% of argentines make $500 a month or less. The people I know who lost apartments when Milei first got in were paying $200 or $300, sometimes split among 2 or 3 roommates.
All the homeless people you see are pretty much guaranteed not to have been doctors or government employees or police, who could earn a thousand dollars or even more every month. These people were splitting $100 rents.
Arcelor, one of the largest steel companies in the world, was paying union steelworkers a big $900 a month at their rosario mill, before they laid off everyone last year. Believe me, those crane operators and furnace crews are not able to pay $600 a month, even when they were employed.

 

[Macanudo]

Six hundred dollars a month? 70% of argentines make $500 a month or less. The people I know who lost apartments when Milei first got in were paying $200 or $300, sometimes split among 2 or 3 roommates.
All the homeless people you see are pretty much guaranteed not to have been doctors or government employees or police, who could earn a thousand dollars or even more every month. These people were splitting $100 rents.
Arcelor, one of the largest steel companies in the world, was paying union steelworkers a big $900 a month at their rosario mill, before they laid off everyone last year. Believe me, those crane operators and furnace crews are not able to pay $600 a month, even when they were employed.

My point is that rents have not increased significantly since Milei has been in office. In 2009 using Craigslist I rented a room in a shared apartment in San Telmo paying US $350 a month. Today it appears that one can find many different options in that same price range. Here is a link to a listing in Parque Chacabuco for $180 a month: https://buenosaires.craigslist.org/roo/d/single-rooms-for-rent/7912116889.html.