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.
