Mrvalj, a former homeless person himself, has been sharing his experiences with citizens and tourists, starting this summer, almost daily.
How to become homeless is one of the first tour lessons.
“It is very easy,” says Mrvalj. “The firm you worked for goes bankrupt, you get sick, or you have a loan you can not pay off.”
He graduated from the School of Applied Arts, and in Sarajevo, where he ran an art gallery, which eventually accumulated debts. Then he lived on the streets of Zagreb for three-and-a-half years.
Mrvalj had a long struggle with bureaucracy to get an all-important identification card. To acquire one, you need a confirmation of residence, and for confirmation of residence, you need an ID.
Of course, an identity card would solve a lot of homeless issues. It is an entry point for the acquisition of basic social care rights – social assistance, soup kitchens and health insurance.
Zvonko Mlinar, from the Croatian Network for the Homeless, told BIRN that homeless people can get an ID card with the address of a shelter or social care centre, but that the procedure is complex if the person’s last residence was far from the location where the centre is located.
According to their findings, among homeless people in Zagreb, 70 per cent had their last place of residence outside the city.
Mrvalj got his lucky piece of paper when the media started dealing with his case. Suddenly, the Social Care Centre solved the problem.
According to FEANTSA, the European Federation of National Organisations working with the Homeless, the homeless population has increased steadily in most EU countries.
When BIRN asked FEANTSA about the number of homeless people in Croatia, they had no specific data, however; it is difficult to establish exact figures, as every country uses a different definition of homelessness and different method of counting.
According to the Croatian Network for the Homeless, there are more than 2,000 homeless people in Croatia, half of them located in Zagreb.
Mlinar told BIRN that FEANTSA has developed a European Typology of Homelessness and housing exclusion, ETHOS, but that this typology is not in use in Croatia.
FEANTSA include rooflessness (without a shelter of any kind, sleeping rough), houselessness (with a place to sleep but temporary in institutions or shelter), living in insecure housing (threatened with exclusion due to insecure tenancies, eviction and domestic violence), and living in inadequate housing (in caravans on illegal campsites, in unfit housing, and in extreme overcrowding).