SPEAKER_02: Every kid learns differently, so it's really important that your children have the educational support that they need to help them keep up and excel. If your child needs homework help, check out iXcel, the online learning platform for kids. iXcel covers math, language arts, science, and social studies through interactive practice problems from pre-K to 12th grade. As kids practice, they get positive feedback and even awards. With the school year ramping up, now is the best time to get iXcel. Our listeners can get an exclusive 20% off iXcel membership when they sign up today at iXcel.com slash invisible. That's the letters iXcel dot com slash invisible. Squarespace is the all in one platform for building your brand and growing your business online. Stand out with a beautiful website, engage with your audience and sell anything. Your products, content you create, and even your time. You can easily display posts from your social profiles on your website or share new blogs or videos to social media. Automatically push website content to your favorite channels so your followers can share it too. Go to squarespace dot com slash invisible for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use the offer code invisible to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. With no fees or minimums, banking with Capital One is the easiest decision in the history of decisions. Even easier than deciding to listen to another episode of your favorite podcast. And with no overdraft fees, is it even a decision? That's banking reimagined. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See Capital One dot com slash bank. Capital One N.A. Member FDIC. This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. So I'm talking with Katie Mingle, 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.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah. So basically, just as I was starting to wrap up the reporting process, the coronavirus came in. It upended everything for everyone. And I've been struggling, you know, 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.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah. So based on data that researchers already have about age and underlying health conditions in homeless people,
SPEAKER_03: 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.
SPEAKER_02: 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.
SPEAKER_03: 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.
SPEAKER_08: 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 Loving. She's the CEO of an organization called Destination Home that, you know, in regular times works on both ending and preventing homelessness in Santa Clara County.
SPEAKER_03: In Santa Clara County, it's like, it's San Jose and Palo Alto and Cupertino. It's basically when people say Silicon Valley, they mean Santa Clara County.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah. And Jen's agency Destination Home has been around since 2008. But during this pandemic, it's basically been kind of like conscripted into this chain of command that's been activated at the county level through something called the Emergency Operations Center.
SPEAKER_03: And every county in California has one of these. So the Emergency Operations Center, or the EOC, gets activated when there's an earthquake, a flood, some sort of thing. This is the very first time, though, that, and I've been a part of an activation a couple of times in my career.
SPEAKER_08: 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.
SPEAKER_03: 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.
SPEAKER_08: 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 eviction moratorium 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. Yeah, stay on. And I believe that's also happening.
SPEAKER_03: 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, like very quickly, to distribute to people who had lost employment and were at risk of becoming homeless. I mean, that seems like that's a success. Like they raised a lot of money in a short amount of time. Is that enough?
SPEAKER_02: Yeah. I mean, I thought that sounded like a lot too, but it actually, it wasn't nearly enough.
SPEAKER_03: Within three hours, we had 1400 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.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, you wrote in a tweet, I feel scared in a way that it's hard to describe. Yeah, it's true. It's true, sister. And I'm not a chicken. I walked into the middle of this stuff for 20 years. And the scale is overwhelming. People already have no money left. Nothing.
SPEAKER_08: Jen estimates that they need about $100 million. And that's, again, just in Santa Clara County to keep people housed during this time.
SPEAKER_03: Wow. And this is on top of the stimulus and unemployment checks, and that's still not going to be enough.
SPEAKER_02: 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.
SPEAKER_03: 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.
SPEAKER_02: And so have they been able to distribute the first $11 million that they gathered?
SPEAKER_03: 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.
SPEAKER_08: 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 disappeared all at once. Right? I think people are probably having trouble knowing how they should balance social distancing and volunteering.
SPEAKER_08: 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. You know, and because, 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 1000 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 sewing a mask, or if that means 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.
SPEAKER_03: 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, of like homeless people being moved into like parking lots and stadiums. Yeah, there was a picture from Las Vegas where they, 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.
SPEAKER_02: Yes, yeah. Which they did because a resident in a like a 500 bed shelter had tested positive for COVID. And so they, you know, 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.
SPEAKER_03: But I just wondered kind of what she, what she thought of that, or things like that. I just, I wonder, I guess I wonder from your perspective when you see something like that, are you kind of like, yep, like, it's a crazy time people are coming up with crazy solutions or, or does that strike you as like, we should be able to do way better than that?
SPEAKER_08: 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 position to criticize other communities because, you know, we're not, we don't have every homeless person in a stable place. We're sheltering in encampments. That is totally wrong. You know what I mean? But we can't.
SPEAKER_08: 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.
SPEAKER_03: Well, thank you so much for your time. Yeah, I gotta go. I gotta go, sister. But yeah, check in with me and whatever you feel like you're curious about.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, and best of luck out there. Hey, thanks so much.
SPEAKER_07:
SPEAKER_02: 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?
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, so on April 3, Governor Newsom announced something that he called Project Roomkey. 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.
SPEAKER_00: We put together the technical teams of 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.
SPEAKER_03: And he's talking about 15,000 rooms across the entire state. And that, again, sounds like it's a lot, but I know for a fact that that's not enough.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, exactly, because there are at least 150,000 homeless people in California, which is why in some places you have activists calling on mayors to do more.
SPEAKER_03: So on April 3, actually the same day as that Newsom 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.
SPEAKER_03: 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.
SPEAKER_01: A caravan of cars circled San Francisco's Moscone Center while Mayor London Breed and city officials held a virtual press conference inside, the message still loud and clear at the socially distant protest.
SPEAKER_03: 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.
SPEAKER_02: 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.
SPEAKER_03: 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. Like, you have to have all this supportive staff who will, you know, provide food and services and clean the rooms, and you can't just, like, move people in and that's it. Yeah, totally. After that protest, the city did decide not to use the convention center as a mass shelter, and Mayor Breed said she's negotiating to bring 7,000 more hotel rooms into use specifically for homeless people in San Francisco.
SPEAKER_02: 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.
SPEAKER_03: 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, you know, 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 sort of it's almost like getting a prescription for a hotel room.
SPEAKER_03: 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 U.S.
SPEAKER_02: 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?
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I mean, I was wondering about this, like how much outreach is happening in encampments? Were 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 in 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.
SPEAKER_07: Hey. Hi. Oh, hey, Shauna. Hey, I know you. This is Katie. Come on around. How you been? I've been OK. How are you? Alive.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah. So that's Shauna sitting outside of her tent with her friend, Jade. Shauna lives in an encampment with about 60 other people, mostly in tents. 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, 30 minutes ago. 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 times a week. Come check up on everyone out here.
SPEAKER_03: Shauna 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 hand washing?
SPEAKER_06: I've done hand washing. A bit more, yeah. A little bit more?
SPEAKER_07: And using the hand sanitizer more. At least try and keep the hands a little bit. I've been washing up in a bucket. I don't care. I've got to stay up on my hygiene somehow.
SPEAKER_02: And how nervous does everyone there seem to be about all this? Yeah, I was wondering that. I asked that too.
SPEAKER_03: Do you feel like you're stressed out about the virus, Shauna? Not so much about the virus. Just life in general.
SPEAKER_06: There's other things to be stressing about. What do you feel like is the main thing you're stressed about right now?
SPEAKER_06: 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.
SPEAKER_07: I don't feel bad. I relapsed after 14 years.
SPEAKER_06: So I feel like a failure right now. And then all this other stuff is going on. So it's just like it's hard to focus on that when I relapsed.
SPEAKER_03: This camp actually has, 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. Andrea has been raising money through a GoFundMe and handing out things like hand sanitizer and face masks. Were they balacavas? Balaclavas? Yeah. Yeah, I call them baklavas.
SPEAKER_03: A lot of the ways that homeless people make money are not possible right now. People used to collect cans to sell at 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. You know, I never had to provide food before.
SPEAKER_09: And I just handed out, I mean, we prepped 300 bags of groceries. I'm not a food distribution person. But I had to be because people were telling me they're hungry.
SPEAKER_03: 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 GoFundMe.
SPEAKER_10: We have to get this trash picked up because in order to mitigate this health crisis in the camps, you know, I'm buying utensils for people, but we're putting them in filthy places. We're installing porta potties in filthy places.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, so a lot of dedicated people out there are 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.
SPEAKER_07: I'll get you. Stay on my way. You just tell me what time you start.
SPEAKER_02: We're gonna move everything to there. Our Unhouse 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. It's 99pi.org. While doing the research for this episode, Katie's assistant producer, Abby Madon, 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. The International Rescue Committee works in more than 40 countries to serve people whose lives have been upended by conflict and disaster. Over 110 million people are displaced around the world, and the IRC urgently needs your help to meet this unprecedented need. The IRC aims to respond within 72 hours after an emergency strikes, and they stay as long as they are needed. Some of the IRC's most important work is addressing the inequalities facing women and girls, ensuring safety from harm, improving health outcomes, increasing access to education, improving economic well-being, and ensuring women and girls have the power to influence decisions that affect their lives. Generous people around the world give to the IRC to help families affected by humanitarian crises with emergency supplies. Your generous donation will give the IRC steady, reliable support, allowing them to continue their ongoing humanitarian efforts even as they respond to emergencies. Donate today by visiting rescue.org slash rebuild. Donate now and help refugee families in need. Chances are you're listening to 99% Invisible on your phone, probably while you're on the go. Think of all that you do on your phone the moment you leave your front door, whether it's looking up directions, scrolling social media, or listening to your favorite podcast. It requires an amazing network. That's why you should switch to T-Mobile. T-Mobile covers more highway miles with 5G than anyone else and helps keep you connected with 5G from the driveway to the highway and the miles in between. Because your phone should just work where you are, it's your lifeline to pretty much everything you didn't bring with you. So next time you head out, whether you're taking a trip or going to work or just running errands, remember T-Mobile has got you covered. Find out more at T-Mobile dot com slash network and switch to the network that covers more highway miles with 5G than anyone else. Coverage is not available in some areas. See 5G details at T-Mobile dot com.
SPEAKER_02: T-Mobile is a great place to start. And the only way to make those racing thoughts go away is to talk them through. Therapy gives you a place to do that so you can get out of your negative thought cycles and find some mental and emotional peace. If you're thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online, designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist and switch therapists at any time for no additional charge. Get T-Mobile's free trial and free trial from your first month. That's BetterHelp. H-E-L-P dot com slash invisible. From her apartment in Oakland, here again is Katie Mingle.
SPEAKER_03: San 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 De Montfort University in Leicester in the United Kingdom.
SPEAKER_03: And so why is it that hotels in particular are deployed in this kind of way? Like, what is it about a hotel that that makes it very useful in a moment like this? I mean, hotels in many respects are perfect for being repurposed in the way that they they are right now.
SPEAKER_04: So if you think about the micro structure 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, atriums can be used as places where medical personnel perhaps are 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 they're, 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.
SPEAKER_04: 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 en-suite facilities so they can shower in the room, they can, you know, 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 centres, sports halls, for example, those sports halls have to be internally reconstructed in order to become quarantine centres or field hospitals. Actually, you have to do a lot less of that in a hotel. So a hotel functions really well. It can be repurposed very, very quickly. Can you talk a little bit about how hotels were repurposed during the recent European refugee crisis?
SPEAKER_04: 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 held 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 leave places like Libya and Syria in 2015-2016 were heading for Germany. And when Angela Merkel essentially said that, you know, refugees, migrants are welcome, she was then faced with the problem of, well, 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 kind of incorporated into society. They could get jobs. They could then perhaps live 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.
SPEAKER_03: And were the hotels still kind of like hotels or were they more like apartments where there wasn't necessarily, you know, like a counter where you check in? 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. The German government paid Grand City hotels for the use of these 22 hotels in Berlin, for example.
SPEAKER_04: 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 guaranteed more or less 100% occupancy rates, but they weren't really functioning as hotels at that time. They weren't, you know, serving breakfast, lunch and dinner. And many of the staff that worked there 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, you know, 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 places this very important role.
SPEAKER_03: And did you hear stories about kind of what these places were like? Like, I mean, it strikes me as potentially, you know, hard to kind of suddenly turn a hotel into this very different function. Did you hear stories of just like what it was like? Like, how did they feed people? And yeah, how did it work? I mean, the difficulty with redeploying a hotel like that.
SPEAKER_04: And this 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, you know, 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 us and them feeling. But it was these were only ever intended to be temporary spaces, three months, six months. And then there 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 were 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 like 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?
SPEAKER_03: They did, because, of course, once the economic situation began to improve in Europe, after 2008, you had the Euro crisis.
SPEAKER_04: And by 2014, you have the beginning of the 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?
SPEAKER_03: 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 is actually extremely businesslike. And this is what's so interesting about the transitions that these buildings go through.
SPEAKER_04: 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. Various hotels are offered. The German government sign or German Dutch Belgian government sign agreements to rent a hotel for that purpose. And then there's the, as I mentioned, the slice of money that's given to redecorate or convert the hotel afterwards back to being a normal hotel.
SPEAKER_03: 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 being used 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 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 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.
SPEAKER_04: They can be quite tall buildings and particularly in an urban conflict, you know, control of the strategic heights is extremely important. So, you know, sometimes hotels can be commandeered for that purpose. What we're facing now with the COVID-19 crisis is something really unique. And, you know, 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 or 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 it happens under the emergency powers that are enacted in the context of conflict.
SPEAKER_03: 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, the St. Regis, the Plaza, Yotel.
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, they become temporary field hospitals, but for non-critical patients. So it's to basically take the pressure off the hospitals themselves. And then, of course, the Four Seasons in Manhattan, which, you know, in any ordinary time would be a rather expensive place to live, is now being opened up to health care workers. I mean, hotels now are being used in a number of ways. So they're being used primarily as quarantine centres because, of course, so many people have had to leave the countries they may be working in or, you know, living temporarily and or on holiday. And of course, they then have to be put into quarantine for a 14-day period. So we've seen hotels open them, some are offering, in fact, quarantine 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?
SPEAKER_03: Yes, I mean, the packages are providing the same service as a hotel normally would.
SPEAKER_04: 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 on offer is not what it would be under normal times. And 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. 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?
SPEAKER_03: Yes, in the case of the UK, I mean, the Crowne Plaza, I think the Holiday Inn, and therefore the Holiday Inn Express, have come to an agreement with the UK government and the Mayor of London.
SPEAKER_04: 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 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 hotels were generally used as places to house the homeless.
SPEAKER_03: And do you know, in those cases, 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 European countries have been testing far more than the UK. The UK, the testing, actually the numbers have been quite low.
SPEAKER_04: So there was no time and no facilities actually to test people who perhaps were 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?
SPEAKER_03: 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?
SPEAKER_04: 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 seriously damaged 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 tourist 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 looked 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. For the time being, many hotels will simply not be able to return to business as usual and revert back to being places where you have weddings and parties and business meetings and holidays and so forth. That can't happen. And 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.
SPEAKER_02: The director of the rest of the team is Delaney Hall, Joe Rosenberg, Vivian Lay, Chris Berube, Avery Truffleman, Sophia Klatsker and me, Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7 KALW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row, which is scattered about in various East Bay apartments but is centred in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. We are a proud member of Radio Topia from PRX, a fiercely independent collective of the most innovative podcasts in the world. Find them all at RadioTopia.fm. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars and the show at 99pi.org. We're on Instagram and Reddit too. We have links to all the organizations that Katie talked to and ways to get involved at 99pi.org. Radio Topia from PRX.
SPEAKER_02: Great sleep can be hard to come by these days and finding the right mattress feels totally overwhelming. Serta's new and improved Perfect Sleeper is a simple solution designed to support all sleep positions. With zoned comfort, memory foam and a cool-to-the-touch cover, the Serta Perfect Sleeper means more restful nights and more rested days. Find your comfort at Serta.com.
SPEAKER_05: For every bit of love you give your baby, make sure you give yourself love too. Introducing a new line of Centrum vitamins created to support moms before, during and after pregnancy from the Women's Choice award-winning multivitamin brand. Visit Centrum.com to learn how Centrum is collaborating with Postpartum Support International to help put moms first. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. These products are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.
SPEAKER_00: With the McDonald's app, you can get your favorite thing delivered to your door so you can eat your favorite thing while you watch your favorite thing at home.
SPEAKER_03: Order McDelivery in the McDonald's app.
SPEAKER_00: At participating McDonald's delivery prices may be higher than at restaurants. Delivering other fees may apply.
