In a general context of increase in homeless people seeking refuge in the existing accommodation offer, 22% last year, the Valencian Community is, along with Navarra, the Spanish autonomy whose resources are closest to the limit. According to data made public yesterday by the National Institute of Statistics, both communities registered an average occupancy of 94.8% of their places for homeless people in 2022, which is to say that the existing facilities are insufficient to respond to any temporary increase in demand.
This occupancy percentage is, furthermore, noticeably higher than the Spanish average, which stands at 81.2%. Only Catalonia suffers from similar healthcare pressure, as its percentage of occupied places in residences designated for this purpose is 93.5%.
That the number of places is insufficient in the Valencian Community is not strange, if we take into account that, being the fourth autonomous region in number of inhabitants, with a big difference over the fifth, it is only the seventh in the average number of accommodation places offered. , with 1,170 for the entire territory.
With less than half the population, Castilla y León has more than 1,900 places and the Basque Country, the absolute leader, offers 4,313, while Galicia is around the Valencian figure.
Regarding the percentage of women who use these services, in Spain as a whole they are around a third (32.8%), with the Valencian Community being a little lower in that percentage (29.2%). At the extremes, both archipelagos, because while in the Balearic Islands 56.2% are women, in the Canary Islands there are barely 16.2% of users.
In Spain as a whole, accommodation centers for homeless people welcomed an average of 21,684 people over 18 years of age daily during 2022, which is 22.0% more than those served in 2020. Of this figure, 7,105 were women.
20.0% of these centers exclusively served homeless immigrants, 7.2% served women victims of gender violence, and the remaining 72.8% were not specialized or served another specialization.
Regarding the dining places offered by each autonomy, the scarcity of resources in the Valencian region is even more striking, as it occupies tenth place, with only 786, far from the almost 6,500 in Madrid, 5,700 in Andalusia, and far below from other much less populated territories, such as Galicia, the Basque Country or Castilla y León.
