Who is protected? Policy responses to Covid-19 in housing and the utilities

Following the Covid-19 outbreak, many governments took measures to both inhibit the Virus’s spread and to mitigate the social and economic consequences of such mitigation measures, as well as those of the pandemic itself. Limiting the Virus’s spread meant closing workplaces, schools and universities and mandating periods of self-isolation and stay at home orders. At the same time, however, governments acted to compensate for such measures, including different forms of spending and rule making, from income replacement measures to rules mandating people retain access to basic services despite a reduced ability to pay. While income replacement was a near universal response, the use of measures aimed at helping people stay in their homes or retain access to the utilities was more limited but still puzzling. First, because it is considered a less efficient form of assistance, and second because it accompanied already existing measures of income replacement. The question is, then, how such measures were used, and why policy makers would choose to use them. The answers to this question have wider implications not just for the study of reactions to the Covid-19 pandemic and economic and social crises more generally, but for our understanding of the state, and how social and regulatory policies are used, interact and may contradict one another.