Homelessness
Image of a sign in the shape of a cross that reads, “Union Gospel Mission / Come to me, all who are weary... I will give you rest.” Credit: USA TODAY NETWORK via Reuters Connect
What’s the most important intervention to assist someone who is experiencing homelessness?
If you said “housing,” then you’d be aligned with the overwhelming consensus of experts. Those who research and study homelessness, people leading nonprofits, service providers, and most importantly, people who have themselves experienced homelessness believe that housing is the bedrock that allows people to rebuild their lives. This approach is called “housing first” because of its emphasis on the following philosophy: Begin with a stable, permanent place to live and then surround people with services. This approach is what helps people resolve their homelessness for good.
Maria Petrishina / iStock
IF MARY AND JOSEPH were living in Missouri today and had to make their own shelter after the innkeepers turned them away, Jesus would be greeted by police officers instead of shepherds. Why? In January, Missouri initiated a new statewide law criminalizing homelessness. The law (and similar laws in several states) is based on template legislation from the Cicero Institute, a right-wing group that peddles legal schemes that limit effective solutions and strip support from people who can’t afford a place to live. If Moses and his tribe were wandering in Tennessee, a law that went into effect in July — supported by Cicero — allows for felony charges for pitching a tent on state-owned property.
Across the country, politicians are passing laws that penalize our neighbors who can’t afford a place to live and who must sleep, shelter, and conduct other life-sustaining activities in public. We have seen the results of those laws at the local level when city councils come up with ineffective — and plain bad — ideas to deal with homelessness. Now there is a well-funded, coordinated push to raise those bad ideas to the state level.
Wrestling with the complicated legacy of Christians and international adoption.
Grace Can Lead Us Home: A Christian Call to End Homelessness, by Kevin Nye / Herald Press
NEARLY ALL OF us have encountered a person on the street who is unhoused and asking for help. Perhaps we have felt conflicted about how to respond: Should we give them cash? Should we offer to pay for a meal instead? Will the cash we give cause further harm through the purchase of alcohol or drugs? It can be difficult to know how to engage responsibly at the personal or the policy level with the growing problem of homelessness in the U.S.
Enter Kevin Nye’s illuminating book, Grace Can Lead Us Home: A Christian Call to End Homelessness. Nye offers a new lens through which to view homelessness and, more importantly, our neighbors experiencing homelessness. For him, this is not just another justice issue, but rather his calling: He has devoted much of his adult life to working with unhoused people in Los Angeles.
Grace Can Lead Us Home explains the macro-level causes of homelessness and contributing factors. And it reveals micro-level approaches to engaging with our unhoused neighbors in a way that centers our mutual need for connection and belonging. He discusses the lack of affordable housing that drives this crisis; the inadequate mental health support available to unhoused people; and the surprising truth about substance abuse and addiction affecting homeless populations.
Charismatic leaders such as Jean Vanier can inspire and transform us. But when these leaders commit abuse, how do the movements they ignite pick up the pieces?
Roland Flores, 48, poses for a picture at the Fullerton Navigation Center, a homeless shelter in Fullerton, Calif., on March 11, 2022. REUTERS/David Swanson
Quick and efficient though they may be, these emergency shelters are a short-term fix. With affordable housing scarce and real estate continuing to rise in one of California’s priciest markets, some critics are concerned Orange County is content to shunt the unhoused out of view without promoting permanent housing.
Lisa Getches stands outside StreetWise’s new office in Chicago, Ill. on Oct. 18, 2021. Madison Muller/Sojourners.
Street newspapers began in New York City as a way to address rising levels of homelessness and combat negative media portrayals of homeless communities, according to the National Coalition for the Homeless. Proponents wanted to both help people earn money and also illuminate their stories and raise awareness of systemic issues. In the decades since, workers at these publications and scholars have debated whether or not street newspaper organizations have been able to achieve that mission.
WE ARE LIVING in dark times. A perfectly timed and distinctive new devotional, Darkness is as Light, wrestles with the dark, and from its many entries emerges a clear chronicle of the real power and meaning of God’s grace for us even—especially—in the dark.
The book consists of nine sections of eight entries each, beginning with a poem by Tennessee poet Allison Boyd Justus. Meditations by 22 authors are based on scriptural texts and grouped by theme: provision, sweetness, healing, death, balm, help, trial, consolation, and closeness. Graphic artist David Moses created striking cover art and illustrations for each section.
These are self-consciously women’s words based on women’s experiences. In her introduction, publisher and editor Summer Kinard draws connections from these modern meditations to ancient women mystics and a kind of Gothic spiritual ethos. There are occasional visions recounted in these pages, and a miracle or two, but mainly we see the range of women’s lived experiences, met every step of the way by grace. The grace of Christ shared with shunned St. Photine, the woman at the well. Ravages of bipolar disorder. Sexual abuse. Food insecurity, homelessness, inability to pay the rent. Leaving an abusive spouse. Caretaking for a chronically ill spouse. Sheltering from an abusive parent. Loss of a child. Unexpected surgeries. The exhaustion of mothering five young children.
Jeronimo Perez Flores with toiletry donations for the campus food pantry.
When Jeronimo Perez Flores was accepted into San Jose State University, he never imagined that enrolling in college would lead him to homelessness.
Screenshot from 'The Last Black Man in San Francisco' trailer / A24
The Last Black Man in San Francisco is a film of operatic intensity, poetic emotion, political clarity, and a touch of magic realism.
Scott DeAngelo, his 22-year-old girlfriend and their 1-year-old daughter ended up at the Western Carolina Rescue Mission after running out of money at a motel. Image courtesy Youth Today.
As thousands of tourists fawn each year over the opulent trappings of western North Carolina’s Biltmore Estates — a four football-field-sized homage to America’s Gilded Age — one of the starkest examples of the nation’s homeless problem endures less than a mile away.
Unique Glover, 21, is involved with The Relatives
Keiston Davis regained his life when he almost lost it. Davis was homeless and sleeping in his car in a parking lot of a Charlotte Walmart one night in January 2016 when a group of young men approached the car and ordered him to get out. He was shot in the face as he exited his car. The would-be robbers fled.
IT IS CRUEL TO PUNISH people for their poverty, but at every level of government, poor people are targeted for unfair treatment under the law. There is perhaps no clearer example of this than the growing criminalization of homelessness in the United States.
The criminalization of homelessness refers to a broad set of policies that punish people for having no indoor homes, such as local laws that prohibit sleeping, sitting, or lying down in outdoor public space. Since 2006, the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty (the Law Center) has tracked the explosive growth of these laws, including a 143 percent increase in those that outlaw living in vehicles. This is often the last refuge for poor families, the elderly, and disabled people who have been priced out of the rental market. Today, for example, half of the U.S. cities surveyed restrict sleeping and sheltering oneself outdoors, even when there are no alternative places to go.
Rather than address the root causes of homelessness, such as low wages that have not kept pace with rapidly rising rents, these policies merely punish people for living outside. Meanwhile, people who are sleeping in tents, lying down on sidewalks, and living in their vehicles are doing so because they are too poor to afford other housing. To jail, ticket, or threaten them for it only makes the problem worse.
People brought to jail for living in public often cannot afford cash bail, so they frequently accept criminal convictions to temporarily regain their freedom. They are then released back to the same streets, with the same lack of options, but with new fees and criminal records that make it even more difficult to get into housing and out of public space. This cycle is expensive and wastes community resources that would be better invested in permanent housing and other proven cost-effective solutions to homelessness.
Image via Shutterstock/Pamela Au
“It's easy to catch a heat stroke from prolonged exposure to the sun and the humidity here in the district,” said Reginald Black, a homeless journalist and vendor for Street Sense, a local newspaper produced and distributed by homeless individuals.
Joseph Sohm / Shutterstock.com
I saw her in the month of mumps
puffed up in poverty’s robes,
a woman of fragments,
a shuffling quilt with running threads—
more holes, really, than skein.
You could read history in the headlines
she wore, partial untruths, incomplete
fictions. All of her lovers
failed to match the shoes she put on.
Every child she birthed missed having
national sunshine and two names.
She dodged taxes on her home;
it never had an address to speak of and
moved like wind-spinning, clanking aluminum cans
she chased for pennies.
Her boudoir looked like a butcher’s sleeve;
stolen ketchup packets from McDonald’s
provided ambergris for her perfume.
She was disqualified for any entitlements
except for open dumpsters on eyeless streets.
But mail always waited for her
no postage due; she was the patron
of the discarded; on winter nights the USPS
coated her from the leprous jaws of the wind.
She slept at the homes of three different zip codes
one January; always leaving at dawn’s early light;
she thought the flag needed to be washed.
Pope Francis speaks before sharing a lunch with the poor following a special mass to mark the new World Day of the Poor in Paul VI's hall at the Vatican, November 19, 2017. REUTERS/Max Rossi
Francis celebrated a Mass marking the Roman Catholic Church's first yearly World Day of the Poor, which the pope established to draw the attention of the world's 1.2 billion Catholics to the neediest.
Image via The Florida Project
"Especially in this day and age, we already are living in tough times…I’ve seen people looking to things like film and television as a means of escape, so I have to acknowledge that people are spending their hard-earned money to go to a movie on a Friday night and want some sort of escape....My hope is that along with getting that escape, they will be positively motivated," says the filmmaker.
Everyone deserves our love, especially those whom the “religious” people deem unworthy — tax collectors, Samaritans, lepers, the homeless, the beggars, the sick, the mentally ill, the despairing.
For many Asian immigrants and refugees, coming to the United States wasn’t fully voluntary, but a result of war and poverty. Just as the Hebrews needed to learn to live as exiles, Asian Americans needed to find a way to make a new home in a new land. While their hardships reflect the difficulty of exile, Jimmy’s and Mary’s familial love and corporate responsibility also model for me how we Christians are to follow Jesus in the midst of this empire.
Some of my friends have been talking about giving up the “evangelical” label, because of what it has come to be associated with, in this year’s political campaign. I’m not ready to make that move. I spent a good part of the 1960s trying hard not to be an evangelical, but without success.
When I marched for civil rights during my graduate school years, I helped to organize “ban the bomb” marches and protested the Vietnam War. I was clearly out of step with much of the evangelicalism of the day.