At the start of the pandemic, there were fears of mass COVID-19 outbreaks among homeless populations — particularly in congregate shelters.
California responded with Project Roomkey, which provided vacant hotel and motel rooms to people experiencing homeless.
Dr. Margot Kushel helped developed that program. She leads the UCSF Center for Vulnerable Populations and the UCSF Benioff Homelessness & Housing Initiative.
She told KCBS Radio's "As Prescribed" on Thursday that experience demonstrated people who are homeless will come indoors if they are offered an option that is private and safe. She said they found people could be kept safe in the pandemic, if they were moved quickly.
"That this is a lesson we can learn for other things other than the pandemic," Dr. Kushel said. "I think that the program overall has been a huge success. I think what comes next is, in some ways, the hard part."
She said, in many ways, policies have not moved on from the time when shelters were designed as an emergency response in the early 1980s.
"Project Roomkey really raises the question of — do we want to go back or is there a new model? There’s certainly tradeoffs. The single non-congregate shelter is more costly," she explained. "On the other hand, the benefits are really pretty striking, and we might want to try to think of moving towards that model for interim housing when we need interim shelter."
Ultimately, though, she said the solution to homelessness is more permanent housing.
As people became unemployed during the pandemic, there were concerns that many more people would become homeless.
"We feared a lot of new entrances into homelessness," said Dr. Kushel. "We’ve certainly seen some, but we haven’t seen the worst of it, I think because of the power of the eviction moratorium."
She added a lot more money has also been made available from federal, state and local governments.
"I hope that we can prevent the worst outcome that we were fearing last January when we actually thought would see 20%-30% increases in homelessness," she said. "I think in some ways maybe we dodged the worst of it, but only because of a sustained and large federal state and local response."
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