Box 2.8: For London’s homeless, COVID-19 has made life even more dangerous

With sufficient political will and flexibility, homelessness — a problem that until the pandemic began appeared to be intractable — can be significantly reduced projected to grow to 440 million households (a total of 1.6 billion people) by 2025 unless drastic measures are taken to address the problem.56 Evidence suggests that homeless populations are at disproportionate risk of infection and death from COVID-19, making protective measures even more pressing. The associated challenges of homelessness, as well as heavyhanded police responses in the form of “sweeps” and other crackdowns, can also increase the possibility of transmission.57 This highlights how strategies to reduce the ongoing spread of the pandemic also overlap with the implementation of long-term social protection measures to reduce socioeconomic vulnerabilities around tenure security and housing affordability.

Encouragingly, many cities were quick to recognize and respond to these challenges in the first months of the pandemic, rehousing their homeless populations in secure, socially distanced accommodation. In Toronto, Canada, authorities provided isolation units and vacant hotel rooms to enable homeless residents to quarantine without putting themselves or those around them in danger. In Bratislava, Slovakia, authorities established an extensive “quarantine town” with medical and professional support to house and care for some 4,000 homeless people.58 In Spain, meanwhile, public authorities partnered with private sector housing providers to temporarily increase their social housing stock: Barcelona, for example, secured 200 vacant apartments through an agreement with a tourism agency to shelter the homeless in the first phase of the pandemic.59

These different examples show that with sufficient political will and flexibility, homelessness — a problem that until the pandemic began appeared to be intractable — can be significantly reduced. Troublingly, however, many cities appear to have rolled back their emergency protections once the worst phase of the pandemic was perceived at the time to have passed. Reversing these hard-won successes is not only short-sighted, but also amount to a “retrogressive measure” — one that “directly or indirectly, leads to backward steps being taken with respect to the rights recognized in the Covenant on Social, Economic and Cultural Rights”60 — prohibited by international human rights law.61 Many cities that have subsequently downscaled their initial support, such as London (Box 2.8), have seen a resurgence in homelessness and with it an increasing risk of COVID-19 infections.

Box 2.8: For London’s homeless, COVID-19 has made life even more dangerous

In London, UK, there was early recognition of the need to ensure that the city’s large homeless population were provided with secure accommodation to protect them from infection and prevent wider community transmission. In response, a range of vacant hotels and offices were swiftly converted with the aim of creating thousands of self-contained safe spaces.62 In a matter of weeks, it seemed that the capital had managed to solve a problem that had been evident in the city for decades — the desperate reality of the more than 10,000 rough sleepers on its streets and many others living in temporary accommodation such as hostels or shelters.63

Nevertheless, this was always intended as a temporary measure and as the pandemic appeared to ease in the summer months of 2020, the emergency accommodation was scaled back.64 By October, however, charities were warning that new lockdown restrictions were pushing large numbers of young people onto the streets.65 By the beginning of 2021, there were reports of an “explosion” of cases among the homeless population, far outstripping the original number of infections in the first weeks of the pandemic.66 This illustrates the need to consider whether cities should consider maintaining emergency provisions for safe and accessible housing to support the most vulnerable, even once the latest waves of COVID-19 recede, given the value of protecting these groups in the long-term from the perspective of public health as well as social justice.