A reader recently responded to my article about sex-for-rent propositions in Germany with an uncomfortable question.

Women, he suggested, may face the terrible choice of accepting sexual demands in exchange for accommodation. But what about men? They might not even receive such offers.

I understood the frustration behind his comment, although I disagreed with its premise. A sexual demand made to someone desperate for accommodation is not an opportunity. It may be exploitation.

His question stayed with me for another reason. We discuss women’s vulnerability in the housing market, often with good reason. But what happens to a man who loses his apartment, cannot afford another and has nobody willing to take him in? Germany’s official figures suggest that this question deserves serious attention.

More than 259,000 men in temporary accommodation

On 31 January 2026, Germany recorded 452,910 people living in accommodation provided because they were homeless. According to the Federal Statistical Office, 259,540 were male, compared with 189,850 female. The remaining 3,520 were recorded with unknown gender.

Men therefore accounted for approximately 57% of those included in the statistics. These are not simply people sleeping on pavements. The figures cover people placed in temporary accommodation by public authorities and other providers, including communal facilities and certain forms of temporary housing.

They exclude people sleeping outdoors and those staying informally with friends or relatives. That distinction is important. Germany’s homelessness problem is larger than the population counted in this particular statistical series. The 2026 figure was also about 5% lower than in 2025. We should not describe every annual movement as evidence of a worsening crisis. But the gender difference remains.

Men are particularly visible among people sleeping rough

Germany’s earlier federal research examined forms of homelessness that are not fully captured by the annual accommodation statistics. The Federal Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs reported that men accounted for 79% of people without shelter in the population examined. Men also represented 60% of people experiencing hidden homelessness, such as staying temporarily with others because they lacked a home of their own.

These figures come from earlier research, not the January 2026 administrative count. They should not be presented as if they measure the same population at the same time. Still, they show why looking only at official temporary accommodation can miss an important part of men’s housing insecurity.

The ministry’s findings also showed that many people without shelter were living alone. For someone with a family, losing a home may lead to a search for temporary accommodation that can keep the household together. A single man may face a different set of immediate choices. He might ask a friend for a sofa, sleep in a vehicle or approach an emergency shelter. None of these possibilities is guaranteed. The important question is what happens when those arrangements fail.

Losing a home is not always about unemployment

There is a temptation to explain homelessness through personal behaviour. Perhaps the person lost a job. Perhaps he made poor financial decisions. Perhaps addiction or illness was involved. Those circumstances can matter in individual cases, but they do not explain every experience.

Germany’s federal research found that, among people without shelter or experiencing hidden homelessness who had previously possessed their own accommodation, 47% reported rent arrears as one reason, or the sole reason, for losing it.

Rent arrears can arise for different reasons. An unexpected expense may leave someone unable to meet a payment. A relationship may break down. Income may become irregular. Someone may struggle to manage a period of illness or unemployment. The research does not establish how frequently each of these circumstances affects men specifically. It does, however, challenge the idea that homelessness can be understood simply by looking at a person’s willingness to work. Losing a home can be the result of several problems arriving together.

Does being male make it harder to rent?

This is where the evidence becomes more complicated. We know that men account for a majority of Germany’s recorded homeless population. That does not prove that landlords generally prefer female tenants.

A gender difference in homelessness could reflect many influences, including household circumstances, patterns of relationship breakdown, income insecurity and the availability or use of support services. To establish discrimination against male rental applicants, researchers would need to compare otherwise similar applications and measure how landlords respond.

There is some useful German research on this question. A field experiment published in the Journal of Housing Economics sent more than 2,000 applications for shared rooms in eight German cities. The researchers varied applicants’ gender and whether their names sounded German or Turkish. They also tested the effect of including information about personality.

The study found differences in responses associated with applicants’ characteristics, particularly ethnicity. But it examined the initial selection process for shared accommodation. Its findings cannot be applied automatically to the entire rental market or used to claim that men everywhere face greater rejection.

Shared housing also involves choices made by existing flatmates, not only landlords. A person choosing someone to share a kitchen and bathroom may consider compatibility in ways that differ from a property owner assessing an applicant for a self-contained apartment. We should examine those choices carefully rather than treating every preference as proof of discrimination.

A single man may face a different housing search

Consider a man who has recently separated from his partner. He needs somewhere to live quickly. His income may be sufficient for a modest apartment, but deposits, moving costs and competition for available properties complicate the search. He might not have relatives living nearby. He may also be reluctant to tell colleagues or friends that he has nowhere secure to sleep.

This is a hypothetical situation, not a documented case. It illustrates the kind of practical problem that homelessness figures cannot explain on their own. The person may remain employed while his housing situation deteriorates. He could spend several nights with acquaintances before those arrangements become impossible. From the outside, his circumstances may remain invisible until he approaches a shelter or starts sleeping outdoors.

I would like to see more reporting on this period between losing a tenancy and becoming visible in official homelessness services. It is a stage at which timely help may prevent a much longer crisis.

What happens when someone asks for help?

Germany has municipal responsibilities for responding to acute homelessness, alongside welfare services and organisations that provide emergency accommodation and advice. The available assistance depends on individual circumstances and local arrangements. A person facing imminent homelessness should contact the relevant municipal housing or social welfare office. Advice services can also help with rent arrears, benefits and possible alternatives to eviction.

But knowing where to ask is only one part of the problem. In the earlier federal study, 47% of respondents in the relevant unsheltered and hidden-homeless groups reported that they had not sought help to prevent losing their accommodation.

That finding deserves attention. It does not establish that men are uniquely reluctant to seek assistance, or explain the reasons for every respondent’s decision. Some people may not know what assistance exists. Others may believe they are ineligible or approach services too late. Understanding those barriers could be as important as counting emergency beds. A housing policy that intervenes only after someone has lost accommodation may miss opportunities to prevent the loss in the first place.

Women’s housing insecurity must not disappear from the discussion

There is a danger in turning these statistics into a contest over which gender suffers more. Women also experience homelessness, and some face particular risks connected to domestic violence or sexual exploitation. Not all of those experiences appear in the same official statistics.

A woman staying temporarily with a friend because returning home is unsafe may not appear in an administrative count of people accommodated because of homelessness. Likewise, a man sleeping in his car may be absent from that count. The differences in visibility make simple comparisons unreliable.

My earlier article, Sex for Rent in Germany: When the Housing Shortage Gives the Wrong People Power, examined documented cases in which people searching for accommodation encountered sexual propositions. Reliable national data on the prevalence of those propositions remain limited.

We should neither minimise such exploitation nor suggest that the people targeted have been offered a useful alternative to homelessness. The more productive question is whether housing policy recognises the different situations in which people lose secure accommodation.

Germany cannot solve this through shelters alone

Emergency accommodation matters. Nobody should have to sleep outdoors because an affordable room is unavailable. But temporary shelter is not the same as having a home. People need stable housing if they are to rebuild ordinary routines, maintain employment and manage their finances.

Germany’s wider shortage of affordable homes complicates that process. In my earlier article, Germany’s Housing Crisis: Why Building More Homes Has Become So Difficult, I examined the gap between construction approvals and completed housing.

Increasing supply can help over time, but new apartments are not necessarily affordable to people leaving emergency accommodation. Prevention matters too. Someone who has fallen behind on rent may need debt advice, benefit support or help negotiating with a landlord before an eviction becomes unavoidable.

A person leaving an institution or separating from a partner may need assistance securing accommodation before a temporary arrangement collapses. The response must therefore begin before someone is sleeping on the street.

We need to understand why men lose their homes

The reader who prompted this article asked whether men face a different predicament in Germany’s housing shortage. The official figures support part of that concern. Men make up a majority of those accommodated because of homelessness, and earlier research found an even higher male share among people without shelter.

But the figures do not explain every reason for that difference. They do not tell us that landlords systematically prefer women. Nor do they establish that men have fewer housing options in every city or household situation. What they establish is that male homelessness deserves sustained attention.

I would like to know more about the men who remain employed while moving between temporary sleeping arrangements, those who lose housing after separation, and those who never approach a support service before their situation becomes desperate. Those questions require better evidence and more direct reporting.

Germany has become increasingly capable of counting people in temporary accommodation. The harder task is understanding what happened before they arrived there. For the man who has nowhere to sleep tonight, that distinction matters. By the time he appears in the statistics, the opportunity to prevent his homelessness may already have passed.