Badr El Merroun, 19: homeless and shut out of shelters in Madrid
Badr El Merroun, 19, is homeless in Madrid: his belongings have been seized three times in a month under unannounced street-cleaning protocols. Shelters are full.
English · Original discussion in Spanish · Published
Badr El Merroun: "They've taken my things three times in a month"
He has been sleeping in a park in the Las Rosas neighbourhood of Madrid for a year. He is Segarro, 19 years old, and has no passport, no phone and no opportunities. "They tell me I can't live on the street, but I've been waiting a year to get into a shelter and I still have to wait another year because everything is full," says Badr El Merroun. Over the past month, he has fallen victim three times to the Madrid City Council's new cleaning protocols, which no longer give homeless people advance notice before intervening. They have taken his clothes, his sleeping bag, his tent, the certificates from a trade course and a necklace his mother gave him.
The situation exposes the paradox of the city's policies: occupying public space is penalised, but no real alternatives are offered. Shelters are saturated and waiting lists are measured in months. El Merroun, like many others, is trapped in a cycle of exclusion in which urban cleaning becomes confiscation without warning.
The public reaction has been mostly hostile, focused on the young man's origins rather than on the flaws in the reception system. He is accused of having money for tobacco or of not wanting to integrate, without considering that he lacks the basic documentation needed to access a job or housing.
Is it the cleaning without notice, or the lack of shelter places, that condemns these young people to a spiral of material loss and lost hope?
Related discussions in the forum
He has been sleeping in a park in the Las Rosas neighbourhood of Madrid for a year. He is Segarro, 19 years old, and has no passport, no phone and no opportunities. "They tell me I can't live on the street, but I've been waiting a year to get into a shelter and I still have to wait another year because everything is full," says Badr El Merroun. Over the past month, he has fallen victim three times to the Madrid City Council's new cleaning protocols, which no longer give homeless people advance notice before intervening. They have taken his clothes, his sleeping bag, his tent, the certificates from a trade course and a necklace his mother gave him.
The situation exposes the paradox of the city's policies: occupying public space is penalised, but no real alternatives are offered. Shelters are saturated and waiting lists are measured in months. El Merroun, like many others, is trapped in a cycle of exclusion in which urban cleaning becomes confiscation without warning.
The public reaction has been mostly hostile, focused on the young man's origins rather than on the flaws in the reception system. He is accused of having money for tobacco or of not wanting to integrate, without considering that he lacks the basic documentation needed to access a job or housing.
Is it the cleaning without notice, or the lack of shelter places, that condemns these young people to a spiral of material loss and lost hope?
Related discussions in the forum
- Ignored misery: a salary and a job no longer keep you out of poverty · 262 replies
- LITERALLY DIED "OF DISGUST": Body of a 40-year-old man found living in a storage room in Logroño (photo + story inside). · 193 replies
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Summary of a discussion on Burbuja.info - Foro de economía, actualidad y política., translated from Spanish and reviewed before publication. Read the full discussion (11 replies).
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