For weeks, advocates and news outlets have been sounding the alarm: The homeless are profoundly vulnerable to the COVID-19 pandemic. The disease is a new and urgent problem that demands emergency solutions, but the crisis should also etch into our minds something that was always true. Housing is inseparable from health care.
Consider the standard COVID-19 advice. Put distance between yourself and others. Wash your hands often. Stay home. With an apartment or house of one’s own, those directives are relatively easy to follow; otherwise, it’s exceedingly difficult.
Around the nation and Texas, homeless shelters are scrambling to find hygiene products and to create space between their residents. It’s a Sisyphean task. There are more than half a million homeless people in America and 25,000 in Texas; a shelter’s job is to harbor as many of them as possible. By the very nature of their work, many shelters must either violate social distancing—meaning their crowded facilities could become hotbeds for the virus—or turn folks out into the streets.
“To maintain a 6-foot distance between people, we would have to evict half our residents, and they have no place else to go,” says Blake Barrow, director of the 190-bed Rescue Mission of El Paso. Barrow is monitoring residents’ health closely, but he lacks face masks and infrared thermometers, and monetary donations have tumbled apace with the financial markets. At the 130-bed ARCH shelter in Austin, director Greg McCormack says he’s spread beds a tad farther apart and residents now sleep head-to-toe, but he’s short on even basic supplies like hand sanitizer. “There’s only so much we can do,” he says.
Then, there’s the more than 200,000 homeless people nationwide and 11,000 in Texas who live “unsheltered.” In outdoor encampments, the unhoused may be able to spread out more, but access to hygiene products and information is starkly limited.