COVID-19 and homelessness: USA

From the very earliest stages of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, people experiencing homelessness were widely recognized as a group that faced particularly elevated threats to their health and well-being. This chapter examines the immediate policy and programmatic responses that were implemented to address the pandemic’s unique threat to the homeless population, reviews existing evidence about the health impacts of the pandemic on people experiencing homelessness and considers how the experience of the pandemic might affect the trajectory of responses to homelessness moving forward. Despite the implementation of an array of unprecedented responses to homelessness in the early days of the pandemic—the most notable of which was the wide-scale use hotels and motels as an alternative to emergency shelter—it does not appear that the COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in a substantial increase in the political will that is ultimately necessary to make substantial and lasting progress towards ending homelessness.