The Persistence of the Homeless Shelter as an Institutional Form: NYC’s Response to Homelessness and COVID Through an Organizational Lens

ABSTRACT

This paper investigates a taken-for-granted institutional form, shelters for unhoused New Yorkers, through the neo-institutional lens of institutional inertia and critical case study methodology. It focuses on the external shock of COVID-19, NYC’s use of unoccupied hotels for social distancing, and the return to shelters when COVID waned. For guidance, we examine other instances of interrupted institutional inertia following shocks. Using Lewin’s force field analysis, we explore why changes to some institutional forms amidst COVID persisted while novel approaches to shelter dissipated. We conclude that directly involving unhoused people in the design and implementation of homeless services may improve outcomes.

Practice Points

• Human service professionals share a body of knowledge and assumptions – a kind of echo chamber that amplifies and confirms beliefs. It is important to look beyond traditional and familiar models of service delivery to find alternative ideas and approaches that may be effective.

• Returning to Kurt Lewin’s concept of force fields provides opportunities to think effectively and holistically about how to modify or change services, policies, and organizations.

• People served by human services – those with lived experiences – possess unique expertise that can inform organizational decisions and planning in new and helpful ways. As practitioners, we need to find ways to be more inclusive of the perspectives and ideas of those our programs serve through participatory methods of planning, decision making, and evaluation.

KEYWORDS:

• Congregate shelters
• COVID
• homelessness
• institutional inertia

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ We will use Shelter for the institutional form, and congregate or homeless shelter when referring to the current congregate shelter instantiation.

Additional information

Funding

This paper comes from work of HOTELS NYC, a working group of homelessness and serious mental illness researchers. It is one of several publications from the collective deliberations and research of this group.