@joepie91 at least in the 90s/00s, squats filled that role to some extent. I suspect one difficulty (even in many parts of Northern Europe) is running a legal shelter requires dealing with a lot of legal stuff/bureaucracy (including valid health and safety regulations) and things like insurance, anarchist groups often lack the resources or understandably may not want to comply to conditions such as shelters being expected to discourage drugs/alcohol use
@vfrmedia Right. I'm not thinking of *legally recognized* shelters, necessarily, more just in the "a place that provides reasonably stable housing to those in need" sense. That seems like a more viable thing to do, and at least in NL I've historically been disappointed by the stance of squats on this matter.
@joepie91 that is exactly what we did with the squats, from about 1997-2004 in a fairly affluent town in SE England called Reading, a mix of homeless folk and partypeople from the rave scene, often we would take two buildings, large commercial one for a party and smaller one for folk to live in and the homeless folk would alternate between the two to keep them occupied. It worked well for quite a while, until too many "bros" at the raves vandalised parts of the buildings and cops clamped down >>