r/europe 2d ago

Picture Every country stressing about homeless people, meanwhile Poland with double side benches:

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27.1k Upvotes

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269

u/KarlWhale Lithuania 2d ago

If I remember correctly, Poland and Baltic states have very low homelessness.

There are people that scour through trash bins to collect enough bottles. But they are technically not homeless since they live in old soviet apartments

52

u/KX_Alax Austria 2d ago

Poland only has low homelessness because all the Polish homeless people left to Germany and Austria. There are 15,000 polish homeless in Berlin alone and tens of thousands more in cities all over Europe. If all those people would have stayed in Warsaw, it would be much worse than any Western European city and rival some American cities for homelessness.

11

u/litlandish United States of America 2d ago

Source please, can’t believe it is true

12

u/Sure_Sundae2709 2d ago

Just google it, there are dozens of newspaper reports about it. Like this one from the public broadcasting service: https://www.mdr.de/heute-im-osten/polen-obdachlose-100.html

Germany had very few homeless before the EU expansion of 2004 and Poland was by far the largest country that directly joined the Schengen area (Bulgaria and Romania were only in 2014).