A Turning Point? Responses to COVID-19 Within the Homelessness Industrial Complex

Abstract

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?

Homelessness, COVID-19, and discourses of contagion

“…Therefore, this article focuses primarily on the ways that service providers described stigmatizing processes from other actors including members of the public, the media, and public health officials and policies. Despite this article's explicit focus on contagion and risk discourses, there are several other ways that COVID-19 and subsequent public health decisions impacted people experiencing homelessness (see Roebuck et al, 2022 ). The second research phase is underway and is explicitly centered on the views and opinions of people with lived experience.…”

Self-care and vicarious resilience in victim advocates: A national study.

“…Today, self-care practices for those who work in the helping professions are generally the responsibility of the employee even though research has shown that company-wide approaches to self-care facilitate individuals’ execution and engagement with the practice (Badr, 2022; Posluns & Gall, 2020; Roebuck, Chapados, et al, 2022). Leaving self-care to the employee, to practice when they can find the time and energy, stems from a neoliberalist approach that places responsibility on the worker, rather than the employer, in creating a healthy workforce (Killian, 2008; Roebuck, Chapados, et al, 2022).…”

“…Today, self-care practices for those who work in the helping professions are generally the responsibility of the employee even though research has shown that company-wide approaches to self-care facilitate individuals’ execution and engagement with the practice (Badr, 2022; Posluns & Gall, 2020; Roebuck, Chapados, et al, 2022). Leaving self-care to the employee, to practice when they can find the time and energy, stems from a neoliberalist approach that places responsibility on the worker, rather than the employer, in creating a healthy workforce (Killian, 2008; Roebuck, Chapados, et al, 2022). In response to the limits to individualized self-care, Newcomb (2022) and Mavridis et al (2019) suggested a need for strengthening worker support at the agency level and the dismantling of oppressive hierarchies and individualistic expectations that can lead to an assigning of blame to workers when their well-being suffers at a job that demands much.…”

“…According to Posluns and Gall (2020), self-care can effectively promote practitioner well-being and ensures effective, ethical practice outcomes. However, undertaking self-care activities is often considered the responsibility of individuals, promoting autonomous practice, with little consideration of how the workplace may influence their understanding and practice of self-care (Newcomb, 2022; Posluns & Gall, 2020; Roebuck, Chapados, et al, 2022).…”

Refusing to Hide: Exploring the Connections Between Homelessness and Incarceration

“…Many of the tactics used to manage homelessness are driven by a desire to hide, invisibilize and misrepresent people experiencing homelessness. We only have to look at the response to increased visible encampments that have emerged from the COVID-19 pandemic to see the lengths housed community members and state actors will go to in their drive to obscure homelessness from public view (Roebuck et al, 2023). Criminalization is a key strategy of this invisibilization, meant to push people out of public space and hide people away in carceral settings, often for minor transgressions, only to abandon them upon their exits from imprisonment.…”