The trip to Utrecht was one of the more interesting trips of the week, if not only for the fact that I was about one of the most important urban issues that we face today—homelessness. The guest lecturer, Nienke Boesveldt, seemed very interested in trying to understand the roots of homelessness and how to fix it. However, I felt that she lectured like an academic. I am not saying that that is necessarily a bad thing in principle, but it made it difficult to stay engaged with the presentation. I understand that when someone gets so specialized into a certain field it can be hard to not get into the minutiae of their research. However, it interrupts the flow of information. Overall though, the lecture was informative and interesting.
There seems to be a stark difference between the people who become homeless in the United States versus the Netherlands. After going to the Salvation Army, and listening to Boesveldt’s lecture, it seems as though the primary group that becomes homeless in the Netherlands are migrants who could not find work soon after arriving in the country. This contrasts with the demographic of the homeless in the United States in the sense that many of the homeless were well established within their own community in the sense that they had some kind of income already and rent just got too high and were forced to leave their homes. While I am sure there are also homeless people in the United States that recently migrated to the country and are homeless because they could not find any opportunities, from the two things we did for the day, it seems that in the Netherlands, the majority of homeless people are migrants from countries that are dangerous to live in or entrenched in political turmoil. The Salvation Army said that the main groups are Eastern Europeans and migrants.
I found it quite amazing that Boesveldt found that very few people get evicted from their homes in the Netherlands because in the United States, it seems like—for many regular people—there is always this looming fear that stems from them trying to figure how to make rent. That psyche seems to be ingrained into popular culture. That was what stuck out to me the most. I know very little about homelessness in the United States, let alone the Netherlands so what I have said may not be true but that is the general sense that I get from using social media and interacting with popular culture. I think that it seems similar to just how American the idea of the television show Breaking Bad is because in most European countries the cost of healthcare is very low, so it would make little sense that a chemistry teacher with cancer would need to turn to making methamphetamine to pay for his treatment and support his family.