Away From Pomp of Olympics, Homeless Shiver on Streets of Milan

Six homeless people have died in the Italian city in recent weeks, highlighting the widening inequality as the Games unfold there.Volunteers helping a homeless person at the Garibaldi station in Milan on Sunday.Credit...Alessandro Grassani for The New York TimesFeb. 11, 2026, 12:01 a.m. ETShortly before 10 p.m. on Sunday night, volunteers dressed in scarlet wind breakers and blue berets climbed the stairs to Platform 12 at a train station northeast of Milan’s city center. As they do every week, they checked on five men huddled there on thin mats and under quilts and blankets.Just a few miles from the stadiums and arenas hosting one of the year’s costliest sports tournaments, the five volunteers, from the City Angels, a nonprofit group that supports the homeless, inquired about the men’s health and gave out hand wipes, apples, cheese sandwiches and, in one instance, a fresh pair of underwear.The work of the volunteers has taken on extra urgency during the recent cold snap with six people dying of hypothermia on the streets of Milan in the past month, according to the local police. Some of them were found close to Olympic venues where spectators are paying as much as $1,650 a ticket to watch athletes compete for medals at the Winter Games.“There are homeless people everywhere,” said Mario Furlan, a life coach and founder of the City Angels. “When a city as organized as Milan, and as rich a city as Milan, has this significant a problem, I feel it is really a shame.”ImageMario Furlan, center, founder of the City Angels, coordinating help for homeless people on Sunday. “When a city as organized as Milan, and as rich a city as Milan, has this significant a problem, I feel it is really a shame,” he said.Credit...Alessandro Grassani for The New York TimesImageThe volunteers’ work has taken on extra urgency in recent weeks, with six people dying of hypothermia on the streets of Milan.Credit...Alessandro Grassani for The New York TimesAt least three of the dead were foreign nationals in a city that has become one of Italy’s hubs for refugees, asylum seekers and those who have come, in some cases illegally, seeking work. Nearly a quarter of people living in Milan are now foreign-born, up from fewer than a fifth a decade ago.There is a vast disparity among them. Alongside those who cannot afford housing, Milan, a city of about 1.4 million, attracts wealthy investors from around the world with lucrative tax breaks that the Italian government awards to high earners and professionals moving from abroad. The number of millionaires in Milan increased by 24 percent from 2014 to 2025, to 115,000 people, according to Henley and Partners, an advisory firm that helps clients use investments to obtain residency or citizenship.Yet the average annual income in Milan remains just over $39,000, according to government figures, while the influx of wealthy newcomers has pushed up housing costs. Rents in the city have risen about 40 percent since 2018, according to Immobiliare, an online real estate portal, and the average price of a single room in Milan, Italy’s most expensive city, is around $870 a month.That has helped push the city’s most desperate onto the streets. A 2024 survey by the Debenedetti Foundation, a nonprofit research group based in Milan, found close to 2,400 people living either on the streets or in shelters, more than three-quarters of them foreigners. Many of them have jobs but are paid so poorly that they cannot afford rent.Earlier on Sunday night at the train station, the volunteers from City Angels distributed bags of food, cornettos oozing with cream, coffee and tea to a group of about 25 men from a panoply of countries, including Afghanistan, Egypt, El Salvador, Morocco, Nigeria and Peru. Many of them were familiar to the volunteer team, who greeted them warmly.ImageAt the City Angels headquarters this month. A 2024 survey found roughly 2,400 people living either on the streets or in shelters in Milan, more than three-quarters of them foreigners. Credit...Alessandro Grassani for The New York TimesImageDistributing food, hot drinks, and clothing outside a train station in Milan on Sunday.Credit...Alessandro Grassani for The New York TimesMigrants are particularly squeezed because many of them are not in the country legally and must work for employers who will pay them under the table. “They end up being exploited,” said Alice Tramontano, protection and program manager in Milan for the International Rescue Committee, a global nonprofit that supports people afflicted by humanitarian crises.Even those with legal permission to work sometimes find that they cannot earn wages high enough to support themselves.Gulrahman Watan, 40, a soldier from Afghanistan who said he had served with NATO forces and had left his country seven years ago because it was not safe for him to stay, showed up at the station on Sunday night for food and warm clothes. There was nothing in his size.Mr. Watan, who left his wife and five children in Afghanistan, said he made less than $9.50 an hour working at a logistics warehouse in Milan. After sending money home to his family, Mr. Watan said, he has little left for more than buying cigarettes and coffee, and sleeps in the station or anywhere he can find. He had assumed the skills he developed after 15 years in the military would be appealing to employers, but even after sending his résumé to dozens of companies, he said, he could find only low-skilled work.“If I have a good job, I don’t need this,” he said, gesturing to the City Angels van.Milan operates about 1,700 beds in shelters for the homeless during the winter, but some lay vacant as foreigners in particular are wary of using them, for fear of being deported.Ahmed, 23, and Rabha, 29, two Egyptian men who did not want to give their last names as they had not immigrated legally to Italy, said they were afraid to sleep in shelters for this reason. Rabha, who lost two toes in an accident in Egypt, said he had not tried to find a job. Ahmed said he worked occasionally at a dry cleaning firm where, he added, the money was not enough. Most nights, they said, they slept in the train station or in construction sites.ImageMilan’s homeless shelters have about 1,700 beds during the winter, but some lay vacant as foreigners in particular are wary of using them.Credit...Alessandro Grassani for The New York TimesImageA volunteer talking with a woman who has been unemployed since the pandemic. Even those with legal permission to work sometimes find that they cannot earn wages high enough to support themselves.Credit...Alessandro Grassani for The New York TimesLamberto Bertolé, Milan’s commissioner for health and welfare, said that although the city had a plan to invest about $47.5 million over the next four years in programming and shelters for the homeless, “many people who live on the streets do so because of our country’s migration policies.”Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s right-wing government has requested legal permission to send asylum seekers to a holding center in Albania while their cases are being processed, a policy that has so far been banned by Italian courts. The Interior Ministry declined to comment about whether the government’s migration policies had exacerbated homelessness.That leaves many migrants, especially those who are not likely to be granted asylum, afraid that they will be taken to a temporary detention center or repatriated, said Mr. Bertolé, who was appointed by the city’s center-left mayor.“So they don’t trust” those trying to help them, Mr. Bertolé added.Milan comes under extra pressure, he said, because its municipal government provides more services than many other Italian cities. “Milan is an attractive city not only for tourists and wealth,” Mr. Bertolé said. “It is also attractive to those in need.” But the absence of more support from the national government, he added, “risks creating imbalances and making our reception and shelter system unsustainable.”Among the six people who died of hypothermia in the past month was Andrea Colombo, 34, an Italian who had fallen out with his family and was living on the street in a neighborhood near a new arena where Olympians are playing ice hockey.Simone Feder, a psychologist and a founder of a volunteer group that assists the homeless in one of the poorest neighborhoods in Milan, described Mr. Colombo as “very kind” and “determined to beat” his heroin addiction “at all costs.”Mr. Feder said he was disappointed that, despite the Olympics’ bringing new investment to Milan, there was not more focus on the neediest.“It seems like this city and society is increasingly a society of everything or nothing,” he said.ImageA tent pitched in the heart of Milan on Sunday. Migrants are particularly squeezed because many of them are not in the country legally and must work for employers who will pay them under the table.Credit...Alessandro Grassani for The New York TimesMotoko Rich is the Times bureau chief in Rome, where she covers Italy, the Vatican and Greece.SKIP