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Paper short abstract:

This paper critically interrogates the claim that ‘homelessness ended’ in the UK during the COVID crisis. I suggest that the realisation of this goal was uneven; and that it was only achieved by the momentary resolution of longstanding crises of governance by moral labour on the frontline.

Paper long abstract:

In March 2020, the British Government announced ‘Everyone In’: an audacious policy initiative that was intended to ‘end homelessness’ when the UK was on the brink of the first national lockdown. Based on an ethnographic study of one English metropolitan borough, this paper recounts the emergency labour of those homeless charity workers who were at the coalface of making Everyone In a reality. It considers the paradoxes and difficulties that Everyone In presented those officials on the frontline. It suggests that Everyone In represented a deferral of the longstanding systemic causes of homelessness, namely the conjoined decline in social housing and financialisation of housing more generally. In this context, I argue that governmental announcements to ‘end homelessness’ were impossible to realise in its entirety and that it only compounded disorder for all parties involved in the early stages of its implementation: an ‘unfix’. I detail how the initial announcement of Everyone In amplified and generated both old and new challenges of the enterprise of ending homelessness. These include the fractured tiers of governance, the insecure and opaque nature of state funding and the consequences of speculative policy making. If a momentary end of homelessness did take place, it was above all an achievement of those workers on the frontline who resolved these absurdities through their own pursuits of the public good. A reprise, it was the culmination of their labour from the bottom-up: to fix the unfixes that Everyone In had initially heralded from top-to-bottom.