Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson has provided exactly one contribution to the U.S. response to the COVID-19 pandemic: praise for impeached President Donald Trump's call for a day of prayer. Meanwhile, cities across the nation are trying to grapple with the coronavirus, asking their residents to stay indoors. What happens to the millions of people who have no homes to retreat into? Shouldn't that be of paramount concern to the guy in charge of, you know, housing?
Diane Yentel, who is president of the National Low Income Housing Coalition, laid out the challenges being faced by homeless service and housing providers in a tweet thread. They don't have hand sanitizer, the first line of defense to provide to a homeless population that doesn't have access to soap and water on the streets, so the service providers are having to make it themselves. Many shelters are losing staff either to illness or having to care for someone who is ill. The volunteers many rely on aren't showing up for shifts, and the shelters don't have funding to hire additional staff.
Shelters around the country aren't prepared for the inevitable outbreak among homeless populations, Yentel writes. And, again, they don't have the resources to even prepare for that, much less respond when they're in the midst of it. Many public places like libraries, where homeless people go during the day when shelters are closed, are shuttering. Shelters are forced to have people in close quarters at night because they have to use the space they have. Social distancing is a luxury they can't afford. She points out that Seattle has responded by trying to obtain hotel rooms to house the most vulnerable and the already ill, but achieving that on a large scale is going to take more funding than many local governments have.
Getting information about the epidemic to the homeless population is another challenge, homeless outreach workers say. It's a population that doesn't have access via local news or the internet on the dangers of the virus and how to try to protect themselves. So far, HUD has not provided any emergency funding to help the homeless, and Carson has passed the responsibility for responding to the likely massive production of shelters off to the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Which is great, except for the part where we're moving into tornado season.
Congress hasn't responded either. The homeless population has urgent needs, and so does the population of people who are one paycheck away from homelessness—and the latter group is growing by the day. The next stimulus package could help those renters, but so far no one is talking about the massive needs of the currently homeless population and the people providing services to them. That's got to change.