Luxembourg bets on giving homeless people a key first, and questions later

The traditional bargain offered to homeless people is a conditional one: get sober, take your medication, prove you are ready, and then, perhaps, you will earn a roof. Luxembourg is increasingly inverting that logic. Under a programme known as Housing First, the most entrenched rough sleepers are handed the keys to an ordinary, permanent flat with no preconditions, on the premise that a stable home is not the reward for recovery but its starting point.

The government frames the model as a way to restore something more fundamental than shelter. Support is offered, but nothing is imposed; the tenant chooses what help to accept and is bound by no deadline. The aim, in the language of the Ministry of Family Affairs, Solidarity, Living Together and Reception of Refugees, which oversees the scheme, is to give people back their stability, their dignity and their autonomy, and to let problems such as addiction or psychiatric illness be addressed afterwards, from the security of a home of one's own.

A small but persistent national problem

Homelessness in Luxembourg is modest in absolute terms but stubbornly resistant to the country's wealth. The most recent national count, carried out on 27 June 2024, recorded 210 homeless people in Luxembourg City, up from 193 a year earlier, and a further 28 in Esch-sur-Alzette, the country's second city, for a combined total of 238 across the two urban centres surveyed.

The census, conducted across 24 neighbourhoods of the capital and 18 of Esch, sketches a recognisable profile. In the capital, 81 percent of those counted were men and 18 percent women, with an average age of around 43. Contrary to the assumption that homelessness is an imported phenomenon, roughly 70 percent held EU citizenship and nearly a quarter were Luxembourg nationals; most had lived in the country for more than five years. Such point-in-time snapshots of people sleeping rough or in emergency shelters almost certainly understate the true scale, which the broader European ETHOS typology used by Luxembourg would extend to people in insecure or inadequate housing.

How Housing First works in the Grand Duchy

Housing First began in Luxembourg as a pilot and has since become a fixture of the country's response to the most severe cases. It is aimed squarely at long-term homeless people with serious mental-health or substance-use problems for whom the conventional staircase of shelters, hostels and transitional accommodation has repeatedly failed. Rather than moving such people up a ladder of supervised steps, the programme places them directly into ordinary rental housing scattered across the normal housing stock, then wraps voluntary social, medical and psychological support around the tenancy.

The work is delivered not by the state directly but through non-profit operators. According to the ministry, current Housing First projects are run by the CNDS-Wunnen department of the Comité national de défense sociale, the Coup de Pouce service of Inter-Actions, and a Hëllef um Terrain project focused on women. Caritas Luxembourg runs its own scheme under the name Ma clé à vie, or "my key for life," housing very vulnerable people whose mental illness or addiction has shut them out of the rental market, again on the principle that nothing is required of them in return.

These efforts sit within a wider ecosystem of housing charities. Wunnengshëllef, a non-profit founded in 1988, manages roughly 150 units largely sub-let from private landlords under social-rental terms and houses close to 400 vulnerable people; the Luxembourg Red Cross runs emergency reception and a housing unit for the most disadvantaged; and Stëmm vun der Strooss provides meals, day services and work reintegration. The numbers reached by Housing First itself remain small: the ministry has indicated the programme assisted 62 people over 2024 and was supporting 46 at a recent count, of whom 33 were in Luxembourg City and 8 in Esch.

Building the capacity to scale

The constraint on Housing First everywhere is the same as the constraint on housing generally: the supply of affordable units. Luxembourg, with some of the highest housing costs in Europe, is attempting to widen that bottleneck on several fronts. A mobile night shelter opened in the capital in December 2023 and a facility for elderly homeless people followed in March 2024, while new sites have been earmarked for Esch-sur-Alzette and Pétange. Individual Housing First flats are planned within the Portes de France development in Belval, the redeveloped industrial district in the south.

Direct placement into permanent, ordinary housing rather than congregate shelters.

Support that is voluntary, open-ended and chosen by the tenant.

Delivery through non-profits, in partnership with municipalities and private landlords.

A deliberate focus on the hardest cases, including elderly and chronically ill rough sleepers.

The Finnish benchmark

Luxembourg's wager rests on evidence accumulated furthest north. Finland adopted Housing First as national policy in 2008 and is, with Denmark, among the very few EU states where long-term homelessness has been falling rather than rising. The number of people living alone in homelessness has dropped by roughly 45 percent since that 2008 programme began, and Finnish data are often cited as showing a fall of around 75 percent from the late 1980s, when records began. In Helsinki, rough sleeping has been all but eliminated, and emergency shelters have been converted into permanent supported flats.

Central to the Finnish result is the Y-Foundation, a non-profit landlord that has assembled a stock of some 18,000 apartments, many bought and renovated specifically to house formerly homeless people. Finnish officials argue the approach pays for itself: research associated with the foundation estimates that moving one person off the street saves the state on the order of 15,000 euros a year in health, social, emergency and justice costs.

The Finnish experience also carries a warning Luxembourg will recognise. After eleven consecutive years of decline, Finland recorded an uptick in homelessness in early 2025, attributed to rising living costs and cuts to social and housing support, a reminder that Housing First is not self-sustaining but depends on a steady supply of genuinely affordable homes and the political will to keep funding it. For the Grand Duchy, where the programme still counts its beneficiaries in dozens rather than hundreds, the question is less whether the model works than whether it can be scaled fast enough to matter.