Pandemic Poverty Governance
By Devin Collins
For most people, the early days of the pandemic will be remembered as a period of significant disruption to our daily lives. But for some of the most marginalized Americans, the pandemic afforded conditions of relative stability, safety, and privacy, as cities across the country turned to hotel rooms as a temporary solution for people experiencing homelessness. In our new article for City & Community, “Pandemic Poverty Governance: Neoliberalism Under Crisis”, we trace how one advocacy organization in Seattle, WA capitalized on the exogenous shocks of COVID-19 and the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement to implement a novel hotel-based homelessness response alternative called “JustCARE.” Based on in-depth interviews with JustCARE leaders, providers, and members of local business groups, as well as participant observation collected over a 14-month period, we explore the emergence and evolution of JustCARE in Seattle. Additionally, we describe how the downtown business community— a coalition historically skeptical of rehabilitative homelessness responses— came to embrace and champion the program.
JustCARE was designed to address many of the shortcomings of traditional approaches to homelessness, which often involve punitive or paternalistic responses (such as police-led encampment sweeps) and are characterized by widespread system fragmentation. In contrast, JustCARE was guided by Housing First and harm reduction principles, meaning participants were not required to alter their behaviors (such as ceasing active drug use) as a precondition of services receipt. We found that JustCARE leaders were able to justify this orientation in light of emergency pandemic conditions, when sheltering people as quickly as possible was a matter of life or death. Moreover, we show how JustCARE leaders seized upon the national conversation around policing and public safety sparked by the BLM movement. To reduce police contact and criminal legal system involvement for hotel residents, JustCARE leaders implemented their own trauma-informed public safety team led by community members familiar with the unhoused population.
We also describe how JustCARE leaders strategically collaborated with downtown business groups to secure buy-in for their program. Historically, business leaders in Seattle and elsewhere have favored more punitive responses to homelessness, believing that police-led responses more effectively remove problematic populations from public view, thereby ensuring economic vitality downtown. By partnering with business organizations and demonstrating that JustCARE could more effectively and more humanely reduce encampments through housing, JustCARE leaders rallied support from a politically powerful and formerly skeptical faction of downtown leaders.
Our case study complicates dominant theoretical narratives in urban sociology and critical geography that construe punitive approaches to homelessness as a functional complement to local elites’ pursuit of economic growth. Our findings also highlight the importance of understanding the macro-, meso-, and micro-level dynamics that facilitate new approaches to poverty governance such as JustCARE. Though JustCARE is not without its critiques and challenges, and its future remains uncertain, the program offers a glimpse at what the path to a more compassionate homelessness response system might look like. The program’s success in Seattle shows that, under the right conditions, socially skilled advocates can build partnerships with politicians and business leaders to implement innovative solutions to complex social problems like homelessness.
Article details
Pandemic Poverty Governance: Neoliberalism under Crisis
Devin Collins, Katherine Beckett and Marco Brydolf-Horwitz
First Published: December 20, 2022
DOI: 10.1177/15356841221140078
City & Community
About the author
