Brno provided housing for people in housing need to 127 households between 2018 and 2022. It plans to provide housing for another 20 households through the Housing first programme between now and 2026. Forty households are expected to find a home through the new Critical Time Intervention (CTI) programme. This is according to a statement by the Brno City Hall following Thursday’s criticism of the city’s approach to homelessness. The reason was the overnight fire in Plotní Street, in which eight people, presumably homeless, died.
City hall spokesman Filip Poňuchálek said the city is continuously involved in various projects to end homelessness. The CTI programme, inspired by the US, is a new one. Its aim is to help people who have been stagnating on the waiting lists for social housing and municipal flats in the city districts for a long time. They are not such a vulnerable group to get higher on the waiting list for social housing, but at the same time they are not solvent enough for a council flat.
“They are still people in housing need. We can find individuals and entire families in shelters and residential hotels,” said Daniel Janeček, the programme’s coordinator, describing the 40 such households to be housed in the next three years.
In the four phases of the programme, the help of a social worker is gradually reduced. In the first one, the pre-settlement phase, the needs of the selected people are identified, and then the clients cooperate with the social worker very intensively during the settlement process. The third part tests the service settings and fine-tunes them if necessary. In the last phase, the meetings should be purely formal. The support always lasts one year. The aim is to stabilise the life situation of the individual or family sufficiently during that time so that they can manage everything on their own, or only with the support of NGOs.
Through the Housing first programme, the city wants to provide housing for 20 households and retain 80 already in housing. The municipality also said that its social curators actively seek out clients who are in an unfavourable living situation in their place of residence all year round. They visit them in the city centre, cottages and squats to offer them social counselling and assistance.They also provide legal advice, for example, and from September 2021, they regularly screen applicants for tuberculosis or arrange employment and part-time jobs. Poňuchálek added that after the night tragedy, the social curators will intensify their outreach activities.
Source: CTK
