Homelessness

Homelessness damages health, while poor health makes escaping homelessness more difficult. In Ukraine, the loss of identity documents can tighten this cycle further, blocking access to medical care, social benefits, employment, and housing precisely when a person needs them most.

Emergency shelters save lives. But when people remain in them for months or years because no permanent housing is available, a temporary response can become a form of prolonged insecurity. The study reveals a system that protects people from the street without consistently providing a path toward a home.

There is no single “typical” homeless person in wartime Ukraine. The people identified in the study include displaced families, older adults, people with disabilities, veterans, former prisoners, workers who lost their livelihoods, and women whose housing insecurity may remain largely hidden.

In wartime Ukraine, homelessness does not begin only with the destruction of a building. It can emerge through displacement, unemployment, unaffordable rent, family separation, disability, trauma, or the difficult return from military service. The report shows how war turns existing vulnerabilities into pathways toward losing a home.

Homelessness is often imagined as sleeping on a sidewalk. In wartime Ukraine, however, the reality is far broader: people may be living in shelters, abandoned buildings, temporary rooms, or the homes of relatives without possessing a safe and stable place of their own.

Official statistics capture only a fraction of homelessness in wartime Ukraine. A major new study by Depaul Ukraine suggests that tens of thousands of people remain uncounted—and that the true crisis may be far larger than existing records indicate.