Bílina is located in the Ústí nad Labem Region and has up to sixteen thousand inhabitants. Before World War II, Sudeten Germans constituted eighty percent of its population. In the aftermath of the War, these people were displaced and their vacant houses were provided to migrants from Czechoslovakia. Great demands for cheap labor to complete massive construction projects, coal mines and thermal plants were met by Eastern-Slovak migrants. Many of these people were Roma, who have been migrating gradually since the 1940s. According to unofficial estimates, approximately two thousand Roma (twelve percent of the city’s population) live in Bílina today.

Areas where the numbers of these people are concentrated tend also to be the areas identified as socially excluded slums. Since the mid 1990s, four fifths of the Roma population has been officially unemployed after having been terminated from the North-Bohemian Brown Coal Mines, glassworks, power plants, construction enterprises and railways, their traditional employers. The current unemployment rate as well as the long-term unemployment rate in the city of Bílina are both among the highest in Bohemia.

Many Roma have adapted to this situation and subsist by combining welfare benefits with irregular income from sporadic illegal employment. Their level of education is generally quite low, as very few people attend high school or university, and a substantial proportion of young children continue to be placed in special schools.

There are four main localities in Bílina which demonstrate visible signs of social exclusion:

• Důlní street – an older quarter, separated from the city by a railway track;
• Teplické předměstí, U Nového nádraží - both newer housing schemes;
• A lodging house for debtors and families in crisis situations that is owned by the municipality and located in a mining zone.