The entrance to Tallinn’s homeless shelter is full of baby carriages, a testimony to the destitution the recession wreaked on young families in Estonia, a Baltic EU state set to join the eurozone on January 1 amid biting austerity cuts.
The shelter is cosy and clean and the staff friendly, but most residents, including 32-year-old Veronika, dream of having a family home again.
“I never imagined I would end up living in a homeless shelter, but here we are now, hoping my husband will get a job finally and we will somehow manage to get back to normal life,” Veronika, a mother of four children aged 1-14, said .
Seduced by easy credit during the economic boom that followed Estonia’s 2004 EU entry, the couple drowned in debt when the global economic crisis slammed Estonia’s export-driven economy in 2008 and Veronika’s husband, a builder, lost his job as the construction market crashed.
“To refinance the debt, we then took a new loan from a bank in the name of a friend who wished to help us but when our hope to get a job failed again and we had to sell our two-room flat and ended up without a home or a salary to rent a flat,” Veronika said.
Veronika’s family of six now relies on a food bank and a monthly state benefit of around €200 ($262) to survive and must spend €91 to pay for accommodation at the homeless shelter.
“While some of our residents have fallen rather low and have problems with alcohol and drugs, the recession has also brought us people like Veronika and her family,” explained social worker Maia-Reet Ehandi, in charge of the shelter’s fourth floor reserved for families.
“We help them cope and all of us hope they will find a way to get a job and a home again,” Ehandi says.
With her husband still unable to find work, Veronika is hoping to enter the job market herself when their youngest child is a little older.
“Our big dream is to get a municipal flat and to have enough money to pay the rent. There is a slight chance my husband will get a job as a security guard in a company,” she sighed.
“We can offer families like Veronika’s a place to live during hard times but all normal people dream about returning to a normal life,” says Ehandi. “Hundreds of people are on the waiting list for our shelter, but it can accommodate 220 people. Many people living here are in line for a flat built and rented by the Tallinn municipality,” she added.