At the beginning of the pandemic, Tiffany Cordaway’s biggest challenge was finding a place to shower. She worked on two jobs in Northern California, disinfecting medical devices the day and worried about an elderly couple overnight. I was just looking to go blank.
But she had nowhere to do that. Cordaway, 47, homeless, sleeping in a friend’s car between her two eight-hour shifts. Unlike her colleagues who talked about taking a shower when they were given the house, she was worried about finding hot water and a position to leave blank where no one could. Some nights he had just given away with a two-litre bottle of water.
“I heard them talk about how, ‘Oh, I’m passing by to stop by and the first thing I do is walk through space and, you know, go straight to the shower,'” he said. “And here, in the back of my head, I think, ‘God, I wish I could do that. ‘
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This story was supported through the Pulitzer Center and produced through the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism at The Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University.
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The misconception that other homeless people are unemployed is not unusual, however, experts say that between 25% and 50% of this population works. In the COVID-19 era, this means that many homeless workers have low-wage jobs in situations that put them at risk of contracting or spreading the virus.
“Many other people wake up in their tent each and every day, wake up in their vehicle each and every day, or wake up in their shelter each and every day and go to the boxes,” said Dr. Marpasst Kushel, professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco and director of his Center for Vulnerable Populations. “The kind of paintings that other people (homeless people) make is the kind of paintings we make to the maximum threat because it’s the kind of paintings you can’t make at home. “
Cordaway said his typical day at a health care company in Milpitas, California, to whiten and sterilize breathing equipment, adding some used through COVID-19 patients.
He said he was afraid to expose his elderly clients to the virus and had taken precautions, such as spraying his clothes and shoes with the same disinfectant spray he used on the paintings and converting before appearing to paint at night.
In May, Cordaway left her friend’s car and moved into a rented room in a house, but the owner welcomed other homeless people who shared non-unusual spaces, she said, and didn’t sit there. studio in hotel for extended stays.
“Other homeless people are not only in a shelter, like an explained population,” dr. Kelly Doran, a New York emergency doctor whose experience includes homelessness. “They’re moving around the world and, you know, the threat and the future because the transmission of the virus goes with them. “
Many of those who paint with homeless communities hesitate to communicate the threat of stigmatizing homeless people more, even if they do frontline work than others avoid.
“Actually, we’ve all been challenged about how we communicate about it because homelessness is very stigmatized and other people blame homelessness on those who suffer from it,” Kushel said. “But let’s be realistic. If we have outbreaks in the shelters, if we have outbreaks in the camps, it doesn’t matter how well we have everything ready. “
Challenging the stereotype
Gathering knowledge on how to execute other homeless people is inconsistent even before the pandemic.
The last national effort to do so in 1996, partly funded through the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, was a 1996 effort. The U. S. , the top federal firm guilty of overseeing homeless systems, revealed that 44% of homeless people were employed.
HUD asks for biennial snapshots of homelessness in county “unique counts” through the department’s 400 local and regional agencies to make plans. While some check to keep up with work, they are not required to do so.
A Howard review of recent single reports through the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism revealed only 44 jurisdictions with data on homeless employment. Of these, the average employment rate is around 19%. It simply provides a vision of reality; data may not be found for part of the places.
Even the tsar of the country’s homeless did not seem to know how hard the homeless work.
“Our other people are not in the service sector on a normal basis,” said Robert Marbut, executive director of the US Interagency Council on the Homeless at the Howard Center. “Our other people paint a lot more than one concert per hour, money under the table. “
Several homeless shelters across the country have long served Americans and contracted families, and now, in the COVID-19 era, they are taking additional precautions to protect their residents.
In New York, two shelters run by bowery’s Residents Committee, a nonprofit organization that provides housing and work progress to homeless people, moved their active citizens from collective shelters to hotel rooms at the time of the pandemic.
Roof Above in Charlotte, North Carolina, changed an empty bedroom to a separate home last May for its homeless citizens who painted to lessen the threat. Liz Clasen-Kelly, executive director of the organization, said there was a threat of sharing a bathroom with eight other men, but less than if they were in the shelter.
“It’s a double risk,” he said of what homeless people and their communities face. “It would be as if other people in nursing homes also go to a grocery mall every day. “
Homeless people in many ways
Homelessness appears to be another in other parts of the country, especially in rural agricultural areas such as Imperial County, California.
Diversity of other homeless people, from illegal out-of-network occupiers in Slab City, named after the remains of a World War II army base, to migrant personnel and day laborers arriving in the United States from Mexico. in a car or “surf on the couch” with friends, or the prestige of your home is adjusted regularly.
HUD’s unique counts don’t come with those other people as homeless people, but when researchers in 2013 accompanied them in the knowledge of homeless people in El Paso, Texas, they added about 11% to homeless people. who said they were more commonly Latino.
Each type of life form carries its own specific threat in the COVID-19 pandemic.
“This challenge isn’t just about low-wage workers,” said Edward Flores, a sociologist at the University of California at Merced, who has studied the convergence of poverty, giant families, and COVID infection rates. 19. “It also affects other people in the families with which they live, because if they contract COVID at home and return to a house with many more people, it has public fitness implications. In addition to those of a smaller home. “
Imperial County had the COVID-19 infection rate in California and crowned the Howard Center’s list of the 43 most vulnerable counties in terms of infection rates and new infections for much of the summer. were the highest affected, Latinos accounted for a disproportionate percentage of the victims.
In his study, Flores discovered that Imperial and thirteen other California counties with giant families of low-wage staff, in addition to Imperial, had the highest infection rates. He stated that the knowledge he analyzed gave the impression of reflecting families with multigenerational, than agricultural, families. staff living in work camps or other institutionalized contexts.
One can locate homeless agricultural staff “sleeping in a car or under a bridge,” Flores said. “This kind of homelessness is a little different from what it would possibly place in the city centres. “
Sergio Gomes Macías, 65, is one of the painters. His poorly paid paintings make housing difficult, so he sleeps on a bench under the palm trees in Calexico, about 150 meters from the Mexican border. The pandemic has made it difficult to find food, water, baths and shelter after it’s not – essential businesses were closed amid the highest infection rates.
Macias said he woke up around 2 a. m. when farm staff piled up to be taken to the fields, they hear other people communicate across the street to see if they have the ability to locate paintings that day, despite the pandemic and the fact that their colleagues have died, he continues to paint.
“If you can take refuge in the place and paint from home, you’re a long way from this pandemic,” said Kushel, the national homeless expert. “Everyone is at great risk. “