One building provides 95 beds in the district of Gràcia and will be managed by the Fundació Salut i Comunitat. Another provides 100 beds in the district of Sant Martí and will be managed by the Catalan red Cross, while the third provides 26 places for women in the district of Sarrià – Sant Gervasi and will be managed by the Centre Assís.

The three facilities are to be funded with 2 million euros from the 3.5 million recently pledged by the Government of Catalonia to help the homeless in the Barcelona metropolitan area. In all, the City Council will have allocated 45 million euros to help combat homelessness this year.

Besides the 221 new places, the city also has 40 places for women at La Llavor, 40 places for young people in Montgat and 70  for people with drug dependencies in a facility belonging to the Fundació Pere Tarrés.

Should there be another outbreak of Covid-19 or should temperatures drop below zero, Barcelona has an additional 400 beds: 75 at the CUESB, 225 at a hall in Fira Barcelona and 50 in a hotel in the Eixample district.

Emergency facilities have helped more than 1,500 people during the pandemic

The temporary accommodation facilities provided help for 1,522 homeless people between March and October, within the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. Of these, 1,286 were men, 232 were women and 4 identified themselves as non-binary.

At the same time, teams from the Open Environment Social Integration Service (SISMO) detected 982 people sleeping rough in the streets last month, the lowest figure in the last three years.

The figures show that preventive work has helped contain homelessness in the city in a situation where at least one in five people at these temporary centres came from outside of Barcelona and nearly half were not sleeping rough, but were actually hot-bedding in the homes of friends or relatives or were in other infrahousing situations.