Crisis Mismanagement

A page on the National Housing Strategy’s website begins, “There is no place like home.” It’s a cozy-sounding, feel-good line — a glib reference to a ruby-slippered fiction full of magic and happy endings that highlights the divide between those tasked with creating solutions to homelessness and those who need them. The same could be said about public health messaging in the early days of the pandemic: Stay home. Stay two metres apart. Wash your hands. This advice did little to help those who had no home, who relied on crowded congregate shelters, and who often lacked access to running water once public washrooms were closed. Time and again, the experiential gap between decision makers addressing homelessness and those who live it is big enough for lives to fall through. And they do, over and over.

In Displacement City: Fighting for Health and Homes in a Pandemic, Michael Eschbach, disabled and homeless for over ten years, refers to “two worlds that will...