Israel officially recognizes 3,500 "street dwellers." Ori Shoham, who has worked with them for 13 years, says the real figure is far higher, and nobody is counting. There is no legal definition of homelessness in Israel. What exists is a Ministry of Welfare category called "street dweller," and Shoham says Israel applies the harshest recognition criteria in the OECD: you have to be visibly on the street, visibly neglected, and you have to walk into a municipal welfare office and declare yourself. Those who manage it receive roughly 800 shekels a month plus about 1,100 shekels in housing aid paid directly to a landlord, money that, in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem, buys a bed in an apartment shared with nine other people. Everyone else: people sleeping in cars, on friends' sofas, in a car park, simply isn't in the data. "They don't have a house," Shoham says. "But they will not be considered street dwellers." Home Base takes the opposite approach, and it is a deliberately strange one: soccer teams, a women's choir, a theater group, Friday dinners, lockers. Israel is a member of the Homeless World Cup network of some 70 countries, and the point of the ball is not fitness: it's contact. Shoham refuses to ask people what they need on a first meeting, calling it patronizing, and waits until trust exists. He says roughly 60% of participants who stay with the program turn their lives around. The interview closes with one of them: a man who spent 20 years in and out of prison and addiction, met Home Base in a hospital bed at 50, became captain of the team, and is now married with three children.
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