99% Invisible - 398- Unsheltered in Place

Episode Date: April 15, 2020

99% Invisible producer Katie Mingle had already been working on a series about unhoused people in the Bay Area for over a year when the current pandemic began to unfold. Suddenly, this vulnerable demographic was cast into the spotlight due to the virulent spread of COVID-19. It is clear from the data that this virus is hitting black and poor communities the hardest. COVID-19 has made American society’s racial and wealth inequities even more obvious. The disease is most dangerous to older and immunocompromised people, two groups to which those experiencing homelessness disproportionately belong. Plus, hotels have long been used as crucial infrastructure during disasters. Now they’re being used to help fight the pandemic. Unsheltered in Place

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. So I'm talking with Katie Mangle, our senior producer. And you've been reporting for about a year and a half on homelessness here in the Bay area for a series that we're putting together right now. It's not ready. It's scheduled to come out at the end of the year. But since the coronavirus crisis has a huge impact on the unhoused population, we wanted

to check in. Yeah, so basically just as I was starting to wrap up the reporting process, the coronavirus came and it upended everything for everyone. And I've been struggling with how or whether to follow any of what's been happening in terms of COVID and homelessness. So not really knowing what I would do with any of it, I just started kind of checking in with people

just over, you know, the phone and zoom and whatnot, trying to at least kind of keep up with it all. And I was recording those conversations and I decided that some of them felt worth sharing. And it seems that homeless people are one of the populations that people are talking about as being particularly vulnerable to this disease. Yeah, so based on data that researchers already have about age and underlying health conditions in homeless people. A study from a team of researchers

at the University of Pennsylvania and UCLA found that homeless people would be twice as likely to be hospitalized as the general population, two to four times as likely to require critical care, and two to three times as likely to die if they contracted COVID-19. And it seems like some of the places where homeless people are the most visible, like the encampments and the shelters are really potential petri dishes for a disease like this to spread. Yeah, I mean social distancing is basically impossible in a shelter. And I think like all over the country, people are scrambling to prevent large scale outbreaks in homeless communities. I only know about what's happening in California. And yeah, I just

wanted to share a few voices from that struggle, I guess we'll call it. The thing that is upside down about this is normally when there's a disaster, we work backwards. There's an earthquake, we work backwards. There's a flood, we work backwards. The thing happens and then we're getting ourselves out of it. This every day we go deeper in. I don't know where the bottom is. That's Jen Leving. She's the CEO of an organization called Destination Home that in regular times works on both ending and preventing homelessness in Santa Clara County. So in Clara County it's like it's San Jose and Palo Alto and Cooper, you know, it's basically when people say Silicon Valley, they mean Santa Clara County.

Yeah. And Jen's agency destination home has been around since 2008. Um, but during this pandemic, it's, it's basically been kind of like conscripted into this chain of command, um, that's been activated at the county level through something called the Emergency Operations Center and every county in California has one of these. So the Emergency Operations Center or the EOC gets activated when there's an earthquake flood, some sort of things. This is the very first time though that and I've been a part of an activation a couple of times in my career. This is the first time though that and I've been a part of an activation a couple of times in my career.

This is the first time though that it was activated for a pandemic, which basically means that the Santa Clara County Public Health Department is in charge. If you're working in homelessness, you're not doing things on your own anymore, meaning supply chain, money, systems, everything gets deployed through this EOC. Yeah, so Jen is essentially working under the direction of the public health department on a few different things. And those things include opening up mass shelters so that existing shelters can be less crowded, bringing sanitation and medical care and resources

to encampments. And then also setting up partnerships with hotels where homeless people can potentially be quarantined. And then the last piece is trying to mitigate the financial catastrophe. If we can keep families from becoming homeless right now, there's a far better chance of recovery later. So we have to do, I think we have to do a few things and I think those things are happening.

We have to have a vision more, Toria, and everywhere needs to have one. We need to make sure that there's food, free food accessible. I think this is also already happening, but like utilities, they need to stay on. Don't care, people don't pay, they have to stay on. And I believe that's also happening.

When she says she believes that's happening, I just want to clarify that she means in her county. So that's obviously different wherever you live in the United States. The other really big thing Jen has been working on setting up is a fund. She raised $11 million very quickly to distribute to people who had lost employment and were at risk of becoming homeless. I mean, that seems like, I mean, that's a success. They raised a lot of money in the short amount of time. Is that enough? Yeah, I mean, I thought that sounded like a lot too, but it actually, it wasn't nearly enough.

Within three hours, we had 1,400 applications. They were coming in at two applications every minute. They crashed our server. And within three days, there were more than $11 million worth of qualifying applications. Yeah, you wrote in a tweet, I feel scared in a way that it's hard to describe. Ah, it's true. It's true, sister. And I'm not a chicken. I walk, I walk into the middle of the stuff for 20 years. And the scale is overwhelming people

already, already have no money left. Nothing. Jen estimates that they need about a hundred million dollars and that's again just in Santa Clara County to keep people housed during this time. And this is on top of the stimulus and unemployment checks and that's still not going to be enough. Yeah I mean for one those checks still haven't gotten to people for the most part. I think the first round of them is supposed to go out this week, but it sounds like it could be a while before everyone has their check. And then there are some people who won't be eligible for those benefits, undocumented

people, for example. And so have they been able to distribute the first 11 million that they gathered? Jen said some of it had started going out, but not all of it. I mean, it's a lot of work to process all of those applications and get all those checks out. And one of the problems they're running up against right now

is that their volunteer support has dried up. And that's not just in their organization, that's happening in every organization. So if you think about most communities have a Meals on Wheels program, and what that is, is homebound people, vulnerable people, people who can't leave their home, there's meals that are prepared and delivered to them every day. Super cool,

right? That is a 95% volunteer run situation. So when all volunteers disappear, all at once. Right? I think people are probably having trouble knowing how they should balance social distancing and volunteering. You know, that's a good question. So I will say that I think that's a personal choice. But what I will tell you is people that are already working on the front lines are in addition to that work, now delivering meals. Because here's the thing, it also has to be done. And COVID is asking us to do all of the things we were doing before and a thousand more things with less. And if you are able to be part of a solution, you need to get on being part of that solution.

And if that means money, or if that means so in a mask, or if that means you have to stay at home and not like complaining, you know, it means all those things. Because people who are the lowest paid workers in this nation who are largely people of color are out on the goddamn front lines. The last thing I wanted to ask Jen about in the, you know, 30 minutes I stole from her was, I don't know if you've been seeing these pictures of, like, homeless people being moved into, like, parking lots and stadiums.

Yeah, there was a picture from Las Vegas where they had a grid was painted out to mark, you know, like, how far they should be camping, like, away from each other. Otherwise, it was just like, it was just like, it was an open parking lot. There was no covering. There was no real shelter. It just was designated spaces on the ground. Yes.

Yeah. Which they did because a resident in a, like, a 500 bed shelter had tested positive for COVID. And so they needed to get everyone out of that space to prevent the virus from spreading. So they moved people into this open, air parking lot. I think they've since been moved back inside. But I just wondered kind of what she thought of that or things like that.

I guess I wonder from your perspective when you see something like that, are you kind of like, yep, it's a crazy time. People are coming up with crazy solutions. Or does that strike you as like, we should be able to do way better than that. You know, I think now, look, pre-COVID-America has treated homelessness in every kind of reprehensible way. Right now though, the people that are trying to do

the things that you're describing, I'm not criticizing them because this is hell. If that's the best that they can do, then that must be the best they can do. We are not doing that. Right? But I am in no positions that criticize other communities because you know, we're not. We don't have every homeless person in this stable place. We're sheltering it in campus.

That is totally wrong. You know what I mean, but we can't. We have asked America to give us more places for homeless people for, you know, my whole career. Now they're telling us all to do it in a week. It's amazing. You know? Well, thank you so much for your time. Yeah, I got to go, I got to go, sister, but yeah, check in with me and whatever you feel like you're curious about something. Yeah, and best of luck out there. Hey, thanks so much.

One of the things you said Jen was trying to do was securing hotel rooms for homeless people. Is that part of the governor's program? Yeah, so on April 3rd, Governor Newsom announced something that he called Project Room Key. He said he had secured almost 7,000 hotel rooms for homeless people, and that they were on their way to getting 15,000. It's a county state partnership with the county fundamentally driving the car

and the state of California building the car. We put together the technical teams and expertise. We are working with the counties as they identify these sites to get the operating agreements up and running. So yeah, when he says that counties are driving the car, he means these emergency operation centers and people like Jen who are out there, you know,

making calls to hotel owners to get them to agree to rent rooms to the state. And he's talking about 15,000 rooms across the entire state. And then again, sounds like it's a lot, but I know for a fact that that's not enough. Yeah, exactly because they're at least 150,000 homeless people in California, which is why in some places, you have activists calling on mayors to do more. So on April 3rd, actually, the same day is that NUSOM press conference. There was a protest in San Francisco. It was a car protest, which is one of the amazing new things that we have in this new pandemic era, where a bunch of people drove their cars to this convention center in San Francisco, where

the city was planning on housing homeless people, sort of on the floor on mats. And the people in cars, you know, sat outside of this convention center honking in protest. They thought that people shouldn't be sheltered together in this big open area, but instead put into hotel rooms. And they were urging the mayor to use her power to get hotel rooms for people. A killer van of cars circled San Francisco's Moscone Center, while Mayor London breed and city officials held a virtual press conference inside. The message is still loud and clear at the socially distant protest.

I talked to this sociologist named Chris Herring who was part of that protest movement to get more hotel rooms. And he says the mayor, London breed, has the authority to commandeer hotel rooms in an emergency. So if they have the power to do it, why aren't they doing it? I mean, it's a power that they don't use very often. Yeah. You know, they say that it's too expensive to put every single homeless person in a hotel. They also say that it's much more complicated than you might think to move people into hotels. You have to have all

this supportive staff who will provide food and services and clean the rooms and you can't just like move people in and that's it it. Yeah, totally. But after that protest, the city did decide not to use the convention center as a mass shelter. And Mayor Reed said she's negotiating to bring 7,000 more hotel rooms into use specifically for homeless people in San Francisco. And so in terms of the hotel rooms that do exist either in San Francisco or more generally across the state, who is getting into those? Well, so not nearly all of those hotels have been filled yet. It's hard to get numbers on this, but some sources are saying that something close to 2,000 rooms across the state have been filled. I think most of the focus so far has been on shelters.

So if there's a shelter where there's a positive case, they're putting people from that shelter who they think may have been exposed into hotels. Part of the criticism right now from advocates is that it's sort of a reactive approach instead of a proactive one, meaning that instead of just immediately putting all homeless people into hotels, they're waiting for cases to break out in shelters. And it's also very much a referral-based system. So if you think you have COVID, you still have to be referred to a hotel room by an approved medical or outreach worker. It's almost like getting a prescription for a hotel room. Last Friday, the 10th of April, mayor breed announced that there had been a major outbreak of coronavirus in a shelter in San Francisco. The last numbers I saw were that 92 residents and 10 workers had tested positive, but those

numbers will probably keep going up. In any case, according to the New York Times, it's the biggest outbreak in a shelter so far in the US. So right now, some of the people in shelters are going into hotels, but only if they've been exposed to the virus. But that doesn't account for all the people in the encampments. What are they doing? Yeah, I mean, I was wondering about this, like how much outreach is happening in encampments,

where people checking, are people checking on folks outside or testing folks outside? I haven't been going into the field much lately for the same reasons that we're all staying home, but I decided I wanted to try and talk to a few people and an encampment, so I put on gloves and a mask and I went out to a camp in Berkeley where I've spent a good bit of time.

So that's Shauna sitting outside of her tent with her friend Jade. So that's Shauna sitting outside of her tent with her friend Jade. Shauna lives in a camp and with about 60 other people, mostly intense. And they said that a nurse practitioner and a social worker had just been out to the camp. And when were they here? Just probably 20 minutes. Maybe 20, 30 minutes ago. And were they just kind of checking to see if anybody had been sick or anything? Yeah, they've been coming out a couple of times and we come check up on everyone out here.

Sean has said that one guy from the encampment had shown symptoms of COVID-19 and one of the outreach workers made sure he got tested and into a hotel. But it seemed like that was the only person so far that had gone to a hotel out there. And do you guys feel like you're doing any extra like hand washing or... I've done hand washing. Bit more, yeah. A little bit more. And using the hand sanitizer more.

At least trying to keep the hands a little bit. I've been washing up in a bucket. Like, I don't care. Like, I gotta stamp all night, hygiene somehow. And how nervous does everyone there seem to be about all this? Yeah, I was wondering that. I asked that too. Do you feel like you're stressed out about the virus? Shona?

Not so much about the virus, just life in general. There's other things to be stressed about. What do you feel like is the main thing you're stressed about right now? Being poor and not being mentally able to work all the time and being stable. I relapsed. I was a year and a half clean and I relapsed. So I don't feel bad out at relapsed after 14 years. So I feel like a failure right now. And then all this other stuff's going on.

So it's just like, it's hard to focus on that when I relax. So. This camp actually has sort of relative to other camps, a good bit of outreach. There's a couple clinics who send workers there. And they have this one extremely dedicated activist named Andrea Henson, who's out there almost every day. and workers there. And they have this one extremely dedicated activist named

Andrea Henson, who's out there almost every day. Andrea's been raising money through a go-fun me and handing out things like hand sanitizer and face masks. Where are they, ball-cloth, ball-a-cabas? Ball-a-cabas? Yeah, I call them a baklava, it's a bitch. A lot of the ways that homeless people make money are not possible right now.

People used to collect cans to sell it recycling centers, and those centers are mostly closed. Panhandling is more difficult right now. So lately, Andrea has had to bring food to the encampment. I never had to provide food before, and I just chanted out, I mean, we prepped 300 beds of grocery. I'm not a food distribution person,

but I had to be because people were telling me they're hungry. She also recently rented a bobcat to try to get all the trash out of the encampment, and she's been paying some of the people around there to help. Again, just all through a go-fun me. We have to get this trash picked up because in order to mitigate this health crisis in the camp,

you know, I'm buying it to be tense for people, but we're putting them in filthy places. We're instilling porta-podies in filthy places. Yeah, so a lot of dedicated people out there working really, really hard right now, but, you know, like Jen said, there are thousands of homeless people in California, and now, you know, everyone wants this all to be solved like yesterday. So, it's tough. What do you think we can do? I was like, please, if you wanted to, any word to get it done, whenever you're ready, then I'll pay you.

I have the garbage bag. I have, we'll put it all the trash on the corner. Go take a take. Bye, Grant. Yeah. Okay, when you're ready, we're gonna move on on to the first time I'll put you on a job program. And I'm going to take you for minimum wage. You can do it once, so I'll give you.

They have a wage. You just tell me what time you start. We're going to move for you to go for everything you've done. Our Unhoused series will be out at the end of the year. If you want to find out more about any of the people or organizations we mentioned in this episode or how you can help or get involved, go to our website at sni9py.org. We'll do the research for this episode, Katie's assistant producer Abby Medon ran across a historian who studied the role that hotels have played in times of crisis. Katie Mingle will be back to talk about that after this.

From her apartment in Oakland, here again, is Katie Mingle. St. Francisco and other cities are looking to repurpose vacant hotels to shelter unhoused people during this coronavirus outbreak. But this isn't the first time hotels have been used as crucial infrastructure in times of crisis. I wanted to find out more about the history of people repurposing hotels this way. So I called up Kenneth Morrison. Hello, my name is Kenneth Morrison, and I'm a professor of modern European history, and I'm based at Demoteford University in Leicester

in the United Kingdom. And so why is it that hotels in particular are deployed in this kind of way? Like what is it about a hotel that makes it very useful in a moment like this? I mean hotels and many respects are perfect for being repurposed in the way that they are right now. So if you think about the microstructure of a hotel, you have large kitchens, you know, lots of refrigeration, you have supply chains. So basically, the hotel can continue to function. It might not be serving the same food, or it might not be serving the same drinks, or whatever, but it can continue to function.

It works. And if you think about the internal structure of a hotel, most hotels have a quite large atrium, so, you know, atrium can be used as places where medical personnel are perhaps based or seeing people as they come in. And all of the rooms function as these kind of isolation units, because when people go and stay in hotels, you know, perhaps they've just got married or there, you know, couples going away for a weekend without the children or whatever, there's, you know, a certain amount of privacy required. So of course that means that every room has to be kind of insulated and isolated. And in the context of the COVID-19 crisis, it's perfect because you have these huge corridors

where food can be left outside the door and the person can be left within this kind of isolated unit which is the room. And the room of course always has on-sweep facilities so they can shower in the room, they can wash, they can sleep, they can watch television, they have access to the internet. So being used as a quarantine centre hotels do that particularly effectively. And if we think of other buildings that might be used as quarantine centers, sports halls, for example, those sports halls have to be internally reconstructed in order to become quarantine centers or field hospitals. Actually, you have to do a lot less of that in a hotel. So hotel functions really well. If you repurpose very, very quickly.

Can you talk a little bit about how hotels were repurposed during the recent European refugee crisis? Yes, I mean, in the case of the migrant stroke refugee crisis in 2015, 2016, of course, you had millions of people coming to the European continent, and sometimes they had to be hailed in camps, but other times they would be held in hotels, so they would be kept in hotels. And there are various different examples of this. The biggest example of this is what happened in Germany, because of course the vast majority of those migrants that were seeking to lead places like Libya and Syria in 2015,

2016, were heading for Germany. And when Angela Merkel essentially said that refugees, migrants are welcome, she was then faced with a problem, what do we do with this sheer number of people? We have to house them somewhere. And the German government actually entered into a number of contracts, agreements with large hotel groups so that the refugees would be housed there.

And they would be housed there for a short time until they could be genuinely incorporated into society. If you get jobs, they could then perhaps slip for apartments of their own and so forth. But the hotel in that context played a really important role in managing that immediate crisis. And that, given the sheer numbers of people that arrived in Germany at that time, has actually been a relative success story, but it wouldn't have been possible without the hotels and the role that the hotel played in that huge movement of people. And were the hotels still kind of like hotels or were they more like apartments where there

wasn't necessarily a counter where you check in and how was it different when the refugees were housed in these places? So basically there were two types of hotels. There were the ones that were completely taken over, essentially. Government contract, German government paid grand city hotels for the use of these 22 hotels in Berlin, for example. And what it meant was that the German government were giving to the hotel industry the finance for that, so that they could continue to operate. So the hotel, for them, at guaranteed,

more or less 100% occupancy rates, but they weren't really functioning as hotels at that time. They weren't serving breakfast at lunch and dinner. At many of the staff that worked, they continued to work there. They were cleaning, they were making food for the refugees and so forth, but it wasn't functioning as a normal hotel.

However, there were other hotels that were actually allowing refugees to work there and training them, and giving them skills that would make it possible for them to enter into work within German society. This happened in Germany, it happened in Austria, it happened in Belgium. Refugees were given an opportunity to train as barmen, to train as waiters, doing silver service and so forth. So they needed to train and do something that would allow them to make a living very, very quickly. And again, the hotel place is this very important rule.

And did you hear stories about what these places were like? It strikes me as potentially hard to suddenly turn a hotel into this very different function. Did you hear stories of what it was like? How did they feed people? How did it work? The difficulty with redeploying a hotel like that, and it was much less the case in Germany, but in other places, locals were very suspicious of a large hotel being taken

over and used as a place to house refugees. So in Ireland, the Republic of Ireland, for example, you had a number of hotels that were redeployed in this way. And lots of luxury hotels were built in Ireland prior to the economic crash of 2008. And of course, after 2008, there wasn't a market. There simply wasn't a market for them. So the hoteliers had to find a way to use the space that they had. So many of these hotels were used as places to house refugees.

Now, sometimes there was a lot of suspicion coming from local populations who weren't happy about this. They felt that putting refugees in a hotel was not an effective way to bring them into the society. You were basically isolating them from society, and it created this kind of ascent them feeling. But these were only ever intended to be temporary spaces, three months, six months, and then they would be, it was part of a kind of wider redistribution program where the refugees wouldn't stay in the hotel for too long. They would be moved on quite quickly. But within the hotels themselves, no, they weren't functioning as ordinary hotels, but there was catering there because that was part of the agreement with the governments that there would be catering for the new guests. But it wouldn't have been anything alike,

the kind of service that a normal hotel would provide in normal times. Right. And then did some of those hotels go back to being sort of normal tourist hotels after? They did. Because of course once the economic situation began to improve in Europe. After 2008, you had the Euro crisis by 2014, you have the beginning of this refugee crisis. But really by 2016, the European economies are a bit more stable. And many of these hotels go back to being exactly what they were intended to be. And is there anything about that process

of converting back that was interesting? Like they probably have to kind of clean and re maybe refurbish some of the rooms? I don't know, like is there a process? Yes, but it's actually a big, extremely business-like. And this is what's so interesting about the transitions that these buildings go through, yes, of course, there will have been the need to redecorate and probably. That was part of the contract with the German government, for example, there was a slice of money in there for that redecoration to take place at the end, because they knew that obviously it wouldn't be. Perhaps kept in the same way as it would have been when functioning as a normal hotel.

But they just moved back to being the spaces that they were and used for the purpose that they were intended for. These are business arrangements, in essence, what we've seen in the case of the refugee crisis in Europe. The building is needed for a specific period of time. VADES hotels are offered, the German government sign, or German Dutch Belgian government sign, agreement to rent a hotel for that purpose. And then there's the, as I mentioned, the slice of money that's given to to redecorate or convert the hotel afterwards back to being a normal hotel.

There are some activists here in the Bay Area like San Francisco, Oakland, who are, you know, the governor here in California has already announced a plan to bring about 15,000 hotel rooms sort of into to being used to to house homeless people here. We have a lot of homeless people in California, but there are activists that are calling on like the mayor of San Francisco, for example, to do to kind of like go a step further and instead of carefully negotiating these deals with hotels to actually like, commandeer them, and that's not a step that she is going to take. It doesn't seem, but have you heard of things like that happening where like people use kind of like an executive privilege to take over hotels when they need to?

Yes, and they can be commandeered in times of crisis. Buildings like hotels can often be strategic assets, because they often occupy strategic heights. They can be quite tall buildings, and particularly in an urban conflict, control of the strategic heights is extremely important. So, you know, sometimes hotels can be common-deared for that purpose. What we're facing now with the COVID-19 crisis is something really unique

and in the context of the United States, for example, that to think that any politician could tell business or a hotel owner that they simply have to take the hotel and commandeer it for that purpose is hugely controversial. We've never been, I think, in a situation in Europe of the United States where that has been necessary, certainly not in living memory. It was necessary during the Second World War where lots of hotels were commandeered, either as field hospitals or bases for various agencies, government agencies who had to move out. London, during the blitz, for example, they had to take over these buildings and turn them into something else for a temporary period until the war was over.

So it's not without precedent, but normally happens under the emergency powers that are enacted in the context of conflict. Well, maybe you could talk a little bit about what you're seeing in terms of the COVID-19 crisis, like what kind of role you're seeing hotels start to take. Absolutely. And New York, I mean, you had a couple of really nice hotels, they sent Regis the Plaza, you hotel, yeah, they become temporary fields hospitals, but for non-critical patients.

So it's to basically take the pressure of the hospitals themselves. And then of course the four seasons in Manhattan, which in any ordinary time would be a rather expensive place to live is now being opened up to healthcare workers. I mean, who tells now are being used in a number of ways. So they're being used primarily as quarantine centers because of course so many people have had to leave

the countries they may have been working in or living temporarily in or in a holiday. And of course they then have been working in, or living temporarily in, or in a holiday. And of course, they then have to be put into quarantine for a 14-day period. So we've seen hotels open the summer offering, in fact. Quadantine packages, where for 14 days you can go and live in a rather nice four or five-star hotel, and have 14 days of quarantine there. Others are being

forcibly quarantined by governments. So when they arrive back on home soil, you then have to spend 14 days in self-isolation. Is there something you get in these quarantine packages that is different like all your food kind of brought to your room? Yes, I mean the packages are providing the same service as a hotel normally would. Although, I mean some people I've spoken to have been in various hotels dotted around the world have complained that the level of service is not quite what they would have expected. So obviously the food I'm all for is not what it would be under normal times. So you're stuck in your room,

it's a beautiful room maybe, with a nice view, but you can't go anywhere. You have food brought to your door, but as I say, it won't be of the same quality that one would have expected in such a hotel, but that's a relatively nice way of being quarantined. In some cases, for example, I spoke recently to a student from Bosnia who had been working in Germany as a researcher and had to return home to Bosnia-Herzegovina. And when they returned home, they were taken to this one hotel in a place called Tuzla in Bosnia and they were to stay there for 14 days. They were basically forcibly held there for 14 days. And this has been happening all over Europe. You know, those that return, they simply have to submit

to be kept in isolation. And what about homelessness specifically? How are you seeing hotels being used? Yes, in the case of the UK, I mean, the crimeaza, I think the holiday in and therefore the holiday in express, have come to an agreement with the UK government and the mayor of London, they've basically handed over hundreds of rooms. I don't know what the financial agreement was there, but those rooms will be available for the homeless of London. And I have to say that the homelessness was becoming something of a crisis in London.

And it was very noticeable over the last couple of years in particular. So it was a real effort required for the UK government to try and get homeless people off the streets. And of course they were hugely vulnerable in the situations that they were in. But there was a big kind of effort to do that and who hotels were generally used as places to house the homeless. And do you know in those cases like were they moving homeless folks into hotels that were already showing symptoms or was it just a proactive let's get everybody inside so that nobody is as vulnerable to this as they would be outside.

Well some utopian countries have been testing far more than the UK. The UK, the testing hasn't actually the numbers have been quite low and so there was no time and no facility is actually to test people who perhaps were you know demonstrating any kind of symptoms even if minor symptoms or kind of early symptoms it was just that they had to be taken off the streets and given somewhere to live, given a roof over their heads for a short period so that they one wouldn't spread the disease and two might not be exposed to those with it. And I'd be really interested to see what these hotels look like inside

at the moment and what kind of services there are and to what extent those people are being looked after. And that I do not know because it's impossible of course to enter into any of these buildings. It's impossible for me to travel really, I can't even go to my university, let alone to one of these hotels for the purposes of research. And what about just sort of like this scale overall around the world? Like do you feel like the number of hotels that have transformed into kind of responding to this crisis in some way would be more than we've maybe seen since one of the world wars.

I think we've never seen anything like this since the Second World War. You've had individual crises in individual countries or even regional conflicts, but you've never seen anything like this because what's happened here is that the hotel industry has been to seriously damage by this. It will take a long, long time for hotels to recover, for tourism to recover from this. So if you even think optimistically that we might get back to some kind of normality in terms of tourism by 2021. So there will be a two to season in 2021. You're looking at at least a year's income, really lost by hotels.

So of course they have to adapt and they have to become something else and they have to offer their services because otherwise they may simply go out of business. And I think that perhaps those hotel chains that have offered their services at this particular time might be more favourably, it loops upon, than those that didn't, if they need to be bailed out in the future. Because of course, the COVID-19 crisis may end in intensity, the kind of intensity that we're experiencing at the moment, but it will take a long time for life to go back to normal for people to feel that they want to travel again for borders to open. you know, you have weddings and parties and business meetings and holidays and so forth. That can't happen. In the countries that are really hit by COVID-19, those hotels have no other option really than to kind of redeploy and repurpose

and become used as something else. something else. 99% of Israel was produced this week by Katie Mingle and Abby Medon, with help from Emmet Fitzgerald. Mixing tech production by Srivusif, music by Sean Riel. Kurt Colsted is the digital director, the rest of the team. Is Delaney Hall, Joe Rosenberg, Vivian Leigh, Chris Baroube, Avery Truffleman, Sophia Klatsker, and me Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7K ALW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row, which is scattered about in various East Bay apartments but is centered in beautiful, downtown, Oakland, California. We are a proud member of Radio Topia from PRX, a fiercely independent collective of the most

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