Letter to Sao Paulo mayoral candidates calls for urgent solutions for homeless people
Document warns of severe vulnerability of city’s homeless people – a group that has grown 17-fold in the space of a decade and 24% in the first half of 2024 alone
The Arns Human Rights Commission, Sao Paulo State Federation of Industry (FIESP) and FGV Sao Paulo Law School have just sent an open letter to Sao Paulo’s mayoral candidates, Ricardo Nunes (Brazilian Democratic Movement Party) and Guilherme Boulos (Socialism and Liberty Party), urging them to pledge to help the city’s homeless people if they win the election.
The letter is signed by Maria Victoria Benevides, a sociologist, University of Sao Paulo professor emeritus and president of the Arns Commission; Oscar Vilhena, a lawyer, professor and dean of the FGV Sao Paulo Law School; and Josué Gomes da Silva, a businessman and president of FIESP. The authors warn of the severe vulnerability of Sao Paulo’s homeless people – a group that has grown 17-fold in the space of a decade and 24% in the first half of 2024 alone.
The signatory organizations argue that whoever wins the election, the new mayor will have an institutional obligation to tackle this serious and historic problem, which now afflicts more than 85,000 people in Sao Paulo, according to figures from the Brazilian Homeless People Public Policy Observatory at Minas Gerais Federal University.
Accordingly, they are calling on the future mayor to take urgent measures to prevent people from becoming homeless, to guarantee the dignity of people who are homeless and to provide pathways for them to leave the streets.
“This is a crucial issue, not just for human rights, but for democracy itself. You can’t develop a city – especially Brazil’s most advanced and wealthiest city – if there are people living on the streets. We need to tackle this problem as an important political and municipal management issue. And now, taking advantage of this election, we have to make this a public issue of the utmost importance. It’s a democratic issue,” said Maria Victoria Benevides, president of the Arns Commission, while signing the letter.
The president of FIESP, Josué Gomes da Silva, invited organizations to join an observatory dedicated to homeless people, which FIESP is setting up to map the situation in the cities that have the most people living on the streets and to give awards for best practices undertaken by the public authorities in this area. “The homeless crisis is unacceptable. We cannot normalize this situation,” he argued.
Oscar Vilhena, the dean of the FGV Sao Paulo Law School, stressed the importance of organizations working together with FIESP. “The federation is an actor that brings more weight to the cause. It can certainly contribute, whether it’s training people who are on the streets so that they can regain employment or alerting society that this is a responsibility shared by everyone,” he said.
To read the full letter, click here.
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