More homelessness after Olympics
While Athens was dazzling the world on the night of the Olympic Games opening ceremony, Giorgos had rummaged through a trash can for his dinner and retired to a quiet park bench. The white-bearded man, who carries all his belongings in a tattered backpack and goes only by his first name, has been roaming the streets of Athens for more than a decade. He once was an oddity in Greece, which has been a European Union member state for nearly a quarter of a century. Welfare organizations now fear that Giorgos may no longer be an exception, but could instead be the new face of Greece’s desperately poor. Experts say Greeks have been forced in increasing numbers to live on the streets because of high unemployment, deepening poverty, and rising property prices brought on by Athens’s rapid gentrification in the runup to the most expensive Games in Olympic history. The billions spent on hosting the Games have also meant that there is much less public money for social welfare programs. European Union experts started noticing Greece’s rapid rise in homelessness even before the Olympics. In 2003, the Brussels-based European Observatory on Homelessness – an EU-funded agency – estimated that homelessness in Greece had soared by 70 percent over a one-year period ending in August 2003 to reach 17,000 people. More than half of the homeless are believed to be in Athens. «There is no official record of the number of homeless, but based on the number of people housed at various shelters we estimate there are about 9,000 homeless people in Greater Athens,» said Katerina Katsabe, an adviser on the homeless for City Hall. City programs offer free medical services, feed some 900 destitute Athenians daily, and work with charities to provide shelters. «We see homeless people of all ages and educational levels,» Katsabe said, adding that the homeless face additional pressure from the influx of economic immigrants competing for low-cost accommodation and casual labor. Panos Tsakloglou, a professor of international and European economic studies at the Athens University of Economics and Business, says about 20 percent of Greeks now live in poverty, a 3 percent rise in a decade. «Poverty is more common among people with low educational qualifications, the elderly, and members of households headed by unemployed persons,» Tsakloglou said, adding that rural migration to cities has worsened urban problems. Nearly half of Greece’s 11 million people live in Athens. Similarly high poverty rates can be found among EU candidate countries in Eastern Europe. According to the World Bank, Romania’s poverty rate stands at 20.5 percent, while Bulgaria struggles with its a 23.7 percent poverty rate. Greece forked out a staggering 11 billion euros (nearly $15 billion) for the 2004 Olympics, badly straining the nation’s economy and leaving little room for the extra welfare spending needed to deal with worsening poverty. The Greek economy faces serious problems despite having one of the European Union’s highest growth rates – 3.9 percent in 2004. Greece’s unemployment rate is 10.2 percent, higher than the EU average of 9.1. Less than half of the country’s population hold full-time jobs. An EU-wide survey by the bloc’s polling agency published in January found that Greeks were by far the most concerned about joblessness among the bloc’s member states. Some 69 percent fear they will be unemployed in 2005 – a 4 percent rise from previous year. The EU average is 46 percent. The EU has given Greece until 2006 to halve its budget deficit – now 6.1 percent of GDP – that resulted from inflated Olympic cost overruns and statistical underreporting by previous governments. For some experts, unemployment in Greece defies economic fundamentals. «The employment gains seen in recent years are low and very disappointing when you consider that economic growth averaged 4 percent in the past six to seven years,» said Platon Monokroussos, an economist with Greece’s EFG Eurobank. «This paradox can partially be explained because we had a significant increase of productivity growth, meaning that with the same working hours we produce more,» he said. Monokroussos says unemployment is fueled by several factors: a lack of coordination between the educational system and the labor market, poor incentives for businesses to hire new workers, low foreign investment and the scarcity of part-time jobs. Experts such as Katsabe and Tsakloglou think there is little room for optimism. «I believe the problem may get worse,» Katsabe said. «There is really high unemployment, the number of people who are being laid off is rising and there is a greater number of people with psychological problems.»
