The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic affected the homeless serving sector in significant ways, including impacts on service users and service providers. In this qualitative case study from Ottawa, Canada, we conducted 28 semi-structured interviews with service providers and key informants from the homeless serving sector to learn more about responses to the pandemic. We argue that, as it is currently designed, the homeless serving sector had limited opportunity to respond to the combined crises in housing, overdose, and COVID-19 with a transformative agenda. The article draws on Dej’s (2020) concept of the homelessness industrial complex, which argues that current systems manage and sustain rather than end homelessness. And we use Lipsky’s (1969; 1980) notion of street-level bureaucracy to explore the role of service providers as they translated shifting public health guidelines into action on the ground within contexts of ambiguity and constraint. Service providers were tasked with keeping people safe from COVID-19 while managing broader social issues such as homelessness, food insecurity, mental health challenges, and an increasingly poisoned illicit drug supply. They described challenges such as narrowly directed funding and short-term and temporary solutions to homelessness. Staff faced significant occupational stress and burnout within demoralizing contexts (Kerman & Kidd, 2021; Kerman et al., 2022). Despite new partnerships and innovative approaches that emerged, responses to the pandemic in Ottawa were shaped by the homelessness industrial complex and did not significantly contribute to ending homelessness. Even so, public health measures were able to disrupt business as usual in the sector, sparking the question: what might be possible if homelessness comes to be understood as a public health crisis?
This article examines how certain neighbourhoods and the populations that reside in them might be understood as safe and good by presenting observations from a walking, autoethnography through and around the suburb in which the author resides. The messages that societies receive and internalize about people who experience poverty are primarily constructed out of neoliberal institutions that uphold the idea that those who live in poverty are there by choice or incapacity and face the appropriate consequences of that choice. Neoliberal discourses devalue the lives of those experiencing poverty by suggesting that they are morally, physically, or mentally incapable of being responsible for themselves. While anyone could potentially experience poverty, the relational construct of the upper class/lower class creates a metaphorical divide that requires deep rethinking to transcend. When spaces are demarcated as unsafe or violent, other spaces are relationally marked as safe or secure. The article concludes that controlling outward appearances largely creates and reinforces constructions of suburban areas as safe in relation to the construction of other areas as unsafe and violent. However, the intensive focus on controlling appearances leads to a mistrust of others and the sacrificing of communities that once existed and thrived.
When schools shut down in Ontario during the COVID-19 Pandemic, many voices chimed in to discuss where children should be. However, children’s voices were largely missing from these discussions by virtue of being excluded by those in charge. Under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989), children are granted the right to express themselves, have that expression be taken seriously, and to be given information on matters that concern them. By conducting an analysis of the Ontario Government’s Back-to-School Plan and announcements, I argue that the developmental and economic framing of the decision to return to school denied children their expression rights guaranteed under the UN-CRC. The Ontario Government missed a vital opportunity to value children as full human beings with integral experiences. I conclude by arguing that it is imperative that the Government commits to using a rights-respecting approach to all policy and programming with potential to impact children or childhood.
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