Homeless in Hong Kong: a cycle of despair for evicted street sleepers with few places to go but back to the streets
Nguyen Van Son and his neighbours on a footbridge in Sham Shui Po, Hong Kong’s poorest district, have limited options after packing up their shelters: a subdivided flat, a ‘coffin home’, or another street berth
Nguyen Van Son is accustomed to rising with the sun. When you’re homeless, he says, if the light doesn’t wake you, the heat will.
But when the sun comes up over the footbridge Nguyen calls home on a recent morning, the 63-year-old hasn’t slept at all. Instead, he has spent the night breaking apart the makeshift hut where he has slept for the past 15 months in Hong Kong’s Sham Shui Po district.
Nguyen has removed the hut’s canopy of blankets, disassembled its bamboo frame, stripped the sheets from his camp bed and packed his belongings into two suitcases. City officials will be there soon, and Nguyen wants to be ready to leave when they arrive.
After more than 450 nights on the footbridge that spans Yen Chow Street, Nguyen is being evicted.
He is one of a dozen homeless people who, five weeks earlier, were ordered to leave by the Sham Shui Po District Office. Officials routinely conduct clearances when homeless encampments violate laws and elicit complaints from the community. But at a time when homelessness is on the rise in Hong Kong – and when affordable housing options are in short supply – homeless people and advocates for them say the clearances leave the homeless with just one less place to go in a city with few options.
“I wish I could stay on the bridge,” says Nguyen, who moved to Hong Kong from Vietnam as a teenager in search of work. “It is the most comfortable place I have found.”
