We, people from São Paulo, like to imagine that we are a welcoming people, given the profusion of accents, colors and origins that are part of our background. But in this welcoming city, it is possible to freeze to death and the corpse remain without anyone bending over to check that that pile of cloth is okay. If you need anything. Or if you still breathe.
It’s not that the city respects everyone’s individuality so much that it doesn’t interfere with their personal space. It only sees the most vulnerable part of the population when it attacks, with its existence, the aesthetic sense of a mistaken concept of a beautiful city. What is not today. São Paulo, like every big city on the American continent, welcomed the poorest who came to build it with open arms – a whip in one hand and unfair laws in the other.
Things have improved over time, but respect for dignity and, within it, the right to housing or social assistance are advancing very slowly. Thanks to people like Father Júlio Lancelotti and the Pastoral do Povo de Rua, the insistent movements for housing and the servants who, contrary to the rest of the public power, do their duty.
But the lack of decent and sufficient care for homeless people and a housing policy that privileges human beings and not the rats and cockroaches in buildings closed by real estate speculation shows that many people are still going to die.
Every time the freezer door opens in São Paulo, I remember how many properties have rats and cockroaches as tenants while people are dying outside. Or people who sleep in shacks, tenements and precarious housing that let the cold in.
The Municipal Secretary of Social Assistance of São Paulo has advanced in good policies for renting hotels and pensions to accommodate those who have nothing, but this is still not enough.
The qualitative and quantitative housing deficit could be drastically reduced if properties locked by brick doors and empty lots could be expropriated by the government and given to those in need – free of charge, in the form of social rent or at below-market interest, depending on needs. and the level of poverty.
But when discussing the need to radicalize affordable housing programs, that phrase appears that proves that tiktaalik shouldn’t have left the water 375 million years ago: “Do you feel bad? Take it home!”
The phrase is an internet classic. handed down ad nauseam when the theme is the life faced by poor, abandoned, drugged and prostituted people that disturbs the image that São Paulo has of itself. They ignore that it is not taking the people home, but making the Union, State and Municipality fulfill their role of guaranteeing a minimum of dignity to those who cannot afford one.
A homeless man died this Wednesday (18), apparently because of the cold. Isaías de Faria was 66 years old and had spent the night on the street in a dawn that registered less than 6º C and an even lower thermal sensation. He was, at that moment, in a shelter, but he didn’t resist. He won’t be the only one.
When the outside cold is too strong, the hypothalamus in our brain loses the ability to maintain our temperature – which normally remains in the 37° Celsius range. Chemical reactions related to the maintenance of life need heat. Without it, muscles stop, breathing and blood circulation decrease, sensitivity disappears with the brake of the nervous system. Consciousness dissolves. All until the heart stops beating.
These chemical reactions repeat themselves every year.
On the corner of Rua Teodoro Sampaio and Avenida Doutor Arnaldo, a man was found dead on a Tuesday afternoon, five years ago, in the midst of the cold that hit São Paulo. Informed in the middle of the afternoon by a call to 190, the Military Police found no signs of violence. The average temperature in the city, at 15:20, was 9.3°C.
The body remained a long time before anyone noticed what had happened. This story does not leave me because I used to pass by that corner daily and, therefore, I brought it back to this text.
Upon hearing this news, I was seized by an insistent sadness. Not out of guilt for not having been there that day, but out of doubt: if I had, would I have been human enough to stop and go ask if everything was okay, as I’ve done before? Would you at least call to notify a public agency? Or would I move on, thinking about a million more important things in my life that are actually less relevant than a life?
The questions say a lot about the nobility of a society, which prides itself on its tolerance of lives it believes are worthless. As long as they don’t aesthetically interfere with reality. And don’t make any noise on your way out.
