#sleeping rough

The “People Lying Around” series is, like all other works, part of the Fast Kunst Vs Boring Art project initiated approximately fifteen years ago.

We express our sincere gratitude to everyone who has sent and continues to send us photographs. Your contributions are invaluable. We encourage you to continue sharing your work.

We acknowledge the contributions of Bibi, Antje, Dirk, Maxim, Martin, and others who have made significant contributions to this project.

Disclaimer: This page primarily featuring homeless individuals “lying around” is not intended to mock or judge them. Our intention is to raise awareness about the prevalence of homelessness , as evidenced by the photographs we have captured from various locations, including Berlin, Vienna, Rome, and others. These individuals often remain invisible to the general public. By creating this page, we aim to increase their visibility.

The majority of photographs were taken by the author, with some contributions received as part of the project. We encourage anyone with inquiries, complaints, or even hate mail to contact us. We will respond promptly, albeit eventually.

Thank you for your attention to this matter. We wish you a productive and fulfilling day.

Don't be a cunt

Anyway, I'm thinking of a whumpee who is used to sleeping on mats (maybe they grew up having to save money on that sort of thing or maybe they have had to flee their home and sleep in makeshift settings for a while) meeting a caretaker who has a penchant for making/buying the fluffiest rugs ever.

After an initial period of trying to understand each other, Caretaker realises that Whumpee knows they can sleep in the bed but they still feel safer on the rugs. And the rugs are fluffy enough that it's causing no harm. Whumpee is just so grateful for how fluffy the rugs are and they do know they can sleep on the bed but also Caretaker understands them.

This one is near the State Parliament and the Supreme Court of NSW.

Money spent and decisions made right next to the beds of those sleeping rough.

Homelessness has long been accepted as an inevitable fact of modern city life. But now a strikingly simple policy, first put forward by a psychologist in the 1990s, is making a dramatic impact in helping to all-but eradicate rough sleeping in cities around the world. The crux of the policy? Simply provide homes to people, without any preconditions. Then provide support tailored to their needs.

Since the US city of Houston adopted it a decade ago – when it had the sixth largest homeless population in the country – the number of people sleeping rough has dropped by 63 per cent. Utah in the US, and Vienna in Austria, have seen similarly transformative results. Helsinki in Finland is on track to entirely eradicate street homelessness by 2025.

These figures are particularly notable given that they are outliers among a much bleaker picture. Since the financial crash of 2008, homelessness has risen exponentially across the western world. In Britain, it has increased by 165 per cent since 2010.

While politicians in places like Hungary and the city of Tennessee in the US have responded by criminalising rough sleeping – resulting in a ballooning of their prison populations – others have taken a more radically progressive approach.

Called Housing First, the policy does exactly what it says on the tin: provides homes to people without preconditions, then wraparound support tailored to their needs. It sounds almost childishly simple, yet it is antithetical to the status quo. Most local authorities in the US and the UK operate what is known as the staircase model. Unlike Housing First, staircase expects people to be sober, engaging with support services, seeking employment, and have completed courses on managing a tenancy. Only then can one be considered housing ready.

Housing First is the brainchild of Dr Sam Tsemberis, a clinical psychologist who came up with the idea in 1992 after he saw patients he’d treated at Bellevue psychiatric hospital roaming New York City’s streets.

Since Houston first trialled it in 2012, they have moved more than 25,000 people from tents and park benches into houses. When they began, it would have taken a homeless veteran (one of the categories tracked by the government) 720 days and 76 bureaucratic steps to move from the streets into housing. Today the wait is just 32 days.