Primary prevention focusses on reducing the risk of homelessness across the whole population, and offers a smarter, more sustainable way forward. It aims to stop homelessness before it starts, by addressing the structural drivers that push people into housing insecurity.
The Problem: Rising homelessness
Homelessness is rising across Europe, and far too often, action only begins once someone is already in crisis. But homelessness doesn’t start with sleeping rough—it starts long before that, in the form of poverty, insecure jobs, unaffordable housing, and health or social systems that fail to catch people when they need support.
Governments continue to prioritise emergency responses, with funding and services heavily geared toward crisis intervention. Yet by this stage, the personal and financial cost is already high—for individuals, services, and society. Without efforts to tackle the root causes, homelessness will continue to rise.
The Solution: Tackling the root cause
Primary prevention work involves broad policy and systemic reforms aimed at reducing poverty, increasing income security, expanding access to affordable housing, and improving education and employment opportunities.
Examples of primary prevention work include:
- Investing in affordable housing: ensuring enough quality homes are available for everyone who needs one. This includes state-led housebuilding programmes, rent controls, and measures to protect tenants’ rights.
- Improving welfare support: income guarantees, housing subsidies, and benefits that reflect the real cost of living and housing.
- Universal education and tenancy training: especially in schools and communities with high rates of housing need, these prepare young people with the knowledge and skills to maintain housing stability
- Reducing poverty and inequality: through fair wages, inclusive employment policies, and robust anti-poverty strategies.
While some of these actions may not always be called “homelessness prevention”, they all reduce the chances of people losing their homes.
Some World Habitat Award winners demonstrate this approach in action. For example, Uruguay’s FUCVAM housing cooperatives create long-term, affordable homes through community-led development—reducing reliance on the rental market and giving low-income families stable housing options. In Belgium, Community Land Trust Brussels secures land for affordable housing in perpetuity, ensuring future generations have access to decent homes even as property prices rise.
Both examples are rooted in the belief that housing should be a right—not a commodity—and show how housing supply and affordability are essential to prevention.
The Impact: Reducing future homelessness
Primary prevention helps reduce the number of people entering homelessness in the first place. It’s harder to measure than emergency interventions, but its long-term benefits are profound:
- Lower homelessness rates
- Reduced pressure on emergency services
- Improved health, wellbeing, and economic stability for households
- More efficient use of public money
A 2023 study from Crisis and Heriot-Watt University confirmed that investing in housing supply and poverty reduction would drastically reduce future homelessness in the UK. The European picture is similar. The evidence is clear: system-level change can make homelessness rare and brief—if governments choose to act.
