This November marked the annual Hunger and Homelessness Awareness Week­—aptly timed to coincide with the season of giving, celebrations of harvest plenty, and, in much of the country, the arrival of the cold, cruel weather that makes homelessness perhaps ever so slightly more in the conscience of those who don’t personally have to worry about it.

This might be particularly true this year, given the “devastating” recent national surge in people experiencing homelessness who are occupying public spaces (also known as “unsheltered”). As downtowns struggle to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic, the “tent cities” and “encampments” that have filled spaces once busy with office workers have become tangible symbols of the virus’s crushing effects.

Given the fractured nature of the American landscape, we shouldn’t be so surprised. While the roots of—and ideally the remedies for—homelessness are expansive across both systems and geography, the visibility of—and hence the unspoken responsibility for—unsheltered individuals is largely confined to the parks and plazas where they congregate and the organizations that manage those spaces. This mismatch perfectly illustrates the perils of the country’s entrenched patterns of segregation—and why reimagining governance is key to dismantling it.

The COVID-19 pandemic has made the limits of quarantine, isolation, and separation policies painfully obvious. Instead, we need to reform, invest in, and break down silos between federal, state, and local governance systems—from housing to health care—that can help prevent homelessness. But we also need to evolve a new generation of hyperlocal place governance organizations that are often already working in the spaces and communities where people experiencing homelessness gather—and who can more intimately see, understand, and help respond to the crisis.

Read the full article about the role of desegregation in ending homelessness by Tracy Hadden Loh and Jennifer S. Vey at Brookings.