“We’re all in this together” was one of the first rallying cries of the pandemic. It could be heard (and still can be heard) from politicians and businesses. In March 2020, it was also a key message from the World Health Organization (WHO, 2020). However, critical scholarship quickly dismissed this message as it did not reflect what was happening on the ground. As discussed in Volume 1, it is abundantly clear that the COVID-19 pandemic was not a great ‘equalizer’, but rather an event whose impact intersected with a myriad of pre-existing inequalities affecting different people, places, and geographic scales.

While the virus itself does not discriminate between rich and poor, Black and White, apartment or house, its impact has been highly uneven as it finds weak spots in society, amplifying pre-existing inequalities and creating new ones. In many instances, these pre-existing inequalities were amplified by the continued financialization and commodification of housing (Marcuse and Madden, 2016; August and Walks, 2018), and more than a decade of austerity imposed after the 2008–09 financial crisis. Nowhere is this more apparent than in housing. Cuts to housing that disproportionately affected those on low incomes, women, racialized populations, and persons with disabilities were some of the major austerity measures in cities and countries around the world (Vilenica et al, 2020).

Despite these cuts and neoliberal approaches to planning and policy before the pandemic, housing has become a central pillar of governmental and public health approaches to fighting the virus. Housing is key to understanding how the virus spreads. ‘Staying at home’ has been one of the main public health messages and central to one's ability to self-isolate and quarantine (Ren, 2020; Rogers and Power, 2020). However, for many, the home is not a place of safety. For those who lack safe, secure housing, particularly unsheltered, or homeless people, being without a house can both increase exposure to COVID-19, and create barriers in accessing health care and support (Rogers and Power, 2020; Tsai and Wilson, 2020). This is why one of the key housing responses to the pandemic has been to provide temporary shelter to these populations (Parsell et al, 2020). Instances of domestic violence have risen during the pandemic, and for many people, including LGBTQ young people, homes can be unwelcome, or unsafe spaces (Rogers and Power, 2020; Salerno et al, 2020; Vilenica et al, 2020).