Gwak died in a gosiwon (low-cost cocoon-like accommodation). Gim died in a long-term care hospital. Yu died in a motel. The list of homeless people who died this year goes on. According to the data collected by Homeless Action, 295 homeless people died while residing in inappropriate shelters, such as the street, gosiwon, motels and jjokbang (subdivided housing, rooms in a house divided into smaller spaces) from December 2019 until November 2020. This number is an unofficial count by the non-government organization (NGO), and in fact, no one really knows how many homeless people die from what cause and in what location.

A group of organizers of the 2020 Homeless Memorial Service held a memorial service for the homeless at Seoul Station square on December 21, and mourned the death of 295 homeless people who died in inadequate shelters. From December 14, when the homeless memorial week launched, until this day, 295 roses and books with the name of the homeless written on them were placed on the stairs of the square. The 295 deaths were a significant increase from the 166 deaths that the joint organizers had collected the previous year. But the group of organizers said, “We cannot simply conclude that the number of deaths soared this year.” They explained, “We don’t even have an estimate on the number of homeless people who die every year.”

The number 295 was the number of deaths that NGOs helping the poor and providing shelters like Homeless Action managed to identify. It was not much different from the number of deaths of people with no surviving relatives identified by the city of Seoul. Bak Sara, an activist at Homeless Action said, “Of the 295 deaths, 278 were the deaths of people with no surviving relatives released by the Seoul metropolitan government.” The other 17 were deaths that the group managed to identify with the help of jjokbang resident groups and in interviews with the homeless.

An Hyeong-jin, an activist at Homeless Action explained that the reason the number of deaths collected by the group increased this year was because the government changed its method of collecting the data on deaths of people with no surviving relatives. He said, “In 2019, the guidelines for burials released by the Ministry of Health and Welfare changed and the government began including people on basic living allowances who died with no surviving relatives among the number of deaths of people with no surviving relatives. This seems to have had a big impact.” He also said, “Homeless people who do not receive burial services for people with no surviving relatives and homeless people outside the Seoul area are still excluded from the statistics.” Activists believe that a number of homeless people, at a scale hard to identify, have died in inadequate shelters.

The central government and local governments do not collect statistics on the death of homeless people. Bak said, “When someone dies, the state is supposed to confirm the death and handle the body, but the government does not categorize the deaths based on clear standards or collect the data afterwards.” She further said, “Since we have no idea from what disease or under what circumstances the person died, it’s difficult to adequately connect this to welfare support.” She continued and said, “In the United Kingdom, the government collects data on the death of homeless people and releases estimates,” and added, “Since NGOs are limited in collecting the data, the government should be more willing.”

Ju Young-su, director of planning and coordination at the National Medical Center, who released a survey on the death of homeless people nationwide in 2011 said, “Data on the death of homeless people is a problem of willingness, not something that requires a new standard or method.” Ju, who was a professor at Hallym University at the time, collected the number of dead homeless people from 1998-2009 by comparing and analyzing the resident registration number and name of the deceased, and date of death in the data registered at nationwide shelters for homeless people and in the data of deaths at Korea Statistics. He argued, “Since the protection of personal information has become important recently, it is extremely difficult for civilians to handle this data,” and added, “The data should be collected by the government, which has the basic information on deaths of all citizens, such as statistics on health insurance and the cause of death.”