The Novel Coronavirus has proven to be an aggressive and stubborn ailment, spreading quickly and causing deaths among the most vulnerable among us.
As I write this, the death toll from the virus in the United States has passed 100 and is expected to rise, while about 8,000 have died around the globe. The infection rate is rising here and, while many states and municipalities have imposed shelter-in-place plans and closed businesses, there remains a large cohort that has drawn little attention: the more than half a million homeless people living on America’s streets.
The National Coalition to End Homelessness reports that “552,830 people were experiencing homelessness on a single night in 2018,” the last official count available. Estimates for the number of Americans who experience homelessness at some point during the year place the number six to eight times the point-in-time figure.
Homelessness has proven to be a stubborn, seemingly unfixable issue, with cities being hit hardest because they serve as central points of trade and services. Cities often are then left to fend for themselves — think President Trump blaming Democratic mayors for the homelessness problem. Homelessness, though, is a systemic issue that can’t be solve by cities alone, nor is it something that can be addressed only by providing housing. There is a need for income supports and on-site services that, if not provided, often doom the newly housed to failure. More significantly, homelessness numbers have been falling since early in the Obama presidency, but we have not been able to get everyone off the streets and into housing, because the economy is not structured to ensure everyone has a place to live or an income adequate to the task.
The homeless are our canaries in the coal mine, the warning signs that an economy that devalues human potential and rewards greed is an economy that is designed to falter and to endanger the community. Capitalism, especially as practiced in the corporate era, is responsible both for the insane wealth we’ve seen accumulated and the environmental collapse, wars, and human displacement that characterize our age.
The homeless, also, are among the most vulnerable population in this country. As The Washington Post reports, housing advocates “fear an outbreak could occur in large homeless encampments where thousands of people live on the street and lack the ability to self-quarantine, receive medical attention or access cleaning facilities.”
This would have massive consequences for all of us, because of the further stress an outbreak like this would have on hospital bed capacity and access to needed equipment. The Associated Press reports that we already are looking at a “critical shortage of mechanical ventilators and health care workers to operate them.”
“The Society of Critical Care Medicine has projected that 960,000 coronavirus patients in the US may need to be put on ventilators at one point or another during the outbreak,” but US hospitals have only 200,000 or so machines, with “around half (being) older models that may not be ideal for the most critically ill patients.”
This is because the economics of the American healthcare make it difficult to plan for large-scale medical disasters. If profit is the primary motive, then purchasing and maintaining expensive equipment like this will not be a priority, and hospitals cannot be faulted for not wanting to sink significant money into equipment that may only get used on rare occasions.
There is little that can be done about that now, however. Now that the nation has finally shifted into containment mode, with businesses being forced to close temporarily and most of us now sheltering in place, we have to turn our attention to getting the homeless off the streets and into services.
“Shelters across the country,” the Post reports, “are grappling with the enormous challenge of increasing capacity to get more people off the streets and increasing space between the beds within their facilities to reduce the risk of spread, according to housing experts and shelter operators.”
Most of the homeless are off the grid, which means they are not being inundated with information about the virus. Advocates told the post that many of those on the streets are “unaware of the dangers posed by the coronavirus.”
As of the middle of March, the Post reports, the Trump administration had not “moved to deploy emergency funding to help the homeless or housing shelters” and Congressional proposals have not included “any measures aimed at the homeless, despite concerns raised by advocacy groups to congressional lawmakers.”
California has stepped up — Gov. Gavin Newsom is making the homeless a priority “as a vulnerable population” and plans “to move people off the streets and into indoor settings, including hotels and motels purchased in recent days and 450 state-owned trailers that will be deployed throughout California.”
Other states and municipalities are likely to follow suit. This will help in the short term, but the reality is that as I wrote late last year, homelessness and so many of our economic, social, health, and environmental ills are a result tied to our addiction to easy money. The issue, as I said, is a “corporate, American-style capitalism that infects every one of our interactions with greed and the disease of misplaced value. It leads us to view those — who either by choice or because they lack choice — live on the streets or seek shelter in rail stations as a matter for police, as a nuisance to public order, one we can whisk away — to jail, to shelters — without giving much thought to the actions we take that contribute to their plight.”
Hank Kalet is a poet and journalist in New Jersey. He teaches at Rutgers University, Middlesex County College, and Brookdale Community College, and is the author of the hybrid collection of poetry and journalism about homelessness, “As an Alien in a Land of Promise.” Email, hankkalet@gmail.com.
From The Progressive Populist, April 15, 2020
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