The Homeless: Part I

This April I wrote a paper on homelessness for one of my seminary classes. The recent anti-homeless laws passed in Berkeley (which I talked about in the last blog) prompted me to republish it here. This is part 1. 

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Yesterday I found myself in conversation with Christina.[1] These days she is fighting back against her slumlord apartment manager. Bad as that sounds, things have not always been this good. Christina grew up against significant odds, born within a highly dysfunctional, generationally impoverished family. Her husband has been in and out of prison (he gets out in a couple weeks), and she has too. Her lack of strong social ties, slim resume and alcoholic coping habits have made things pretty tough. Amidst these struggles, Christina found herself on and off the street. As she said, “Last time was about a year ago when I was homeless on the West Side.” All this has been particularly hard on her three kids.

As we talked, I found myself remembering other friends of mine who are all too familiar with concrete nights. I thought of the time I met Dale panhandling a downtown Houston off-ramp. He was a couple months out of prison, but with no identification papers of any kind he'd found it just about impossible to land a steady job or place to live, much less access the social safety net. Then I pictured Merl with a big, goofy grin on his face when he told us in absolute honesty, “I’m addicted to milk!” And he was. Sober as could be, but would never go a day without dairy. We grabbed him a gallon and a new bike tube that afternoon. Ed was under a different bridge on that same highway. A veteran who suffered from debilitating PTSD flashbacks, he was a highly intelligent, avid reader whose disability kept him from holding a job.

As far as I know, Rich and Larry are best buds to this day, sipping Wild Turkey between AA meetings. It took six months of friendship building before I got up the courage to ask if I could stay with them over Memorial Day weekend. Those three days were the closest I have ever been to seeing the world as a homeless person sees it. They make me think of Mary Anne and Robert, long-term partners who lived together on the creek south of downtown Colorado Springs. He was a huge, grizzled guy, kind as they come, who always looked out for his much smaller soulmate. I pray I never forget the choked up hug Rob gave me when she left him. It was not unlike the hug Jacob--AIDS patient, brilliant chef, gay, repeatedly rejected--gave before he left town for more secure housing with a distant family member.

Then there is Shannon, whom I loved and miss so dearly. But there aren't enough pages to tell her story here.

These old friends makes this a hard paper to write. It catches me red handed where cynicism has snuck in over the past several years. After all, at least two of these folks are dead, most are still homeless, and all struggle on in one way or another. The presentness of their pain is arresting. It rebels against overly clinical analyses of the homeless as though they are a “population,” and homelessness as though it were an issue or cause. My emotion is important; it rises out of relationship, and without relationship there will never be transformation. However, it is partially people’s emotional reactions to homelessness that are the problem. When emotions slip into emotionalism they soon terminate in unquestionable ideologies, stymieing critical thought. The homeless service “industry” is chronically devoid of innovation for exactly this reason. Therefore, in this paper I strive for criticality without negating the personal contexts my thought has emerged from. Since all thought is unavoidably contextual anyways, this seems like the right framework for the task at hand.[2]

The second reason this paper is difficult is because of the jarring dissonance I experience when my knowledge outpaces my obedience--or, less critically, when the source of my frustration does not line up with my present call. I do not know how directly or deeply I will be connected to homeless ministry in the future. I had fairly well walked away from this group until the past few months when God, I suppose, prompted me to include them as a research subject for this class. Re-engaging has felt a bit like rediscovering a missing piece of myself.

It is from this liminal position that I now turn to engage the fact of homelessness. Who are the homeless? I mostly skip over this broad question. They are too diverse a group to adequately capture, and I am not interested in narrowing down to subcategories like families, children or the “chronically” homeless. For my purposes, ‘homeless’ will simply represent its tautology: those without a home. My interest is this: Why is it that the wealthiest nation in the history of the world consistently has between 1 to 2% of its people sleeping on the street, in their cars or bumming on a family members couch every night? And what can we the Church do about it?



[1] - All names have been changed (except for Shannon's) to protect the persons' privacy.
[2] - See MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality?; Dyrness, Learning About Theology from the Third World. I am also reminded of the fantastic introduction to Miroslav Volf’s Exclusion & Embrace where he wrestles with his unavoidably subjective memories of genocide while seeking to articulate an objectively meaningful theological response to the evil he experienced.

A Not-So-Advent Blog: In Memory of a Poor Kid Born Homeless a Couple Thousand Years Ago

Folks protesting the new anti-homeless law in front of Berkeley City Hall.

A bizarre thing happened in Berkeley this week. Shrugging off its reputation as the progressive capital of the world, this town's city counsel decided to pass a bill that criminalizes homelessness.

Here's an article from the "homeless newspaper" Street Spirit explaining what went down.

I guess if you can get past the city's reputation, it isn't really that strange after all. Just remember the famous 'ole Bill Clinton line: it's the economy, stupid.

The cost of housing is painfully high here in Berkeley, as it is around the Bay Area. The average home price--average--is hovering just under a million dollars. "One bedroom apartments in Berkeley rent for $2921 a month on average and two bedroom apartment rents average $3651" (source - thank goodness we found something for less than this but its still excruciating!).

With that kind of insane real estate market, the straightforward solution--providing homes--is impossible (not to mention the additional homelessness created by displacement, something that becomes epidemic when landlords hike the rent 30% in a year). Of course, the Bible's 15 year plan to end homelessness is still on the table: "bring the homeless poor into your house" (Isaiah 5:7). But there doesn't seem to be a lot of that going around (myself included).

In other startling news, Berkeley claims illustrious spot #10 on the list of cities with the highest inequality in the country (i.e. the wealth and income differentials of its residents), higher than any other city in California. And as inequality rises, a mind-numbing host of social maladies follow.

The economic El Niño conditions have converged to pour on the homeless. This climate, for a variety of reasons, breed an atmosphere of wealthy, profit minded people who know that it is only the sensible, good-for-business act to sanitize the environment so a person (aka: consumer) can walk to shops without being accosted by dirty panhandlers who subvert their portentous sense of the sublime. Thanks to the merchant members of the Downtown Berkeley Association and the Berkeley Chamber of Commerce (and to a public who went right along with it), we now have laws that make people's poverty and lack of shelter illegal. As much of an injustice as that appears at face value, it seems even more sinister once we come to terms with the truth: homelessness is a natural byproduct of the economic system we as a society have chosen.

In the classic tradition of empires everywhere, we have criminalized the victims of our own injustice.

Though this response falls dramatically short of what's needed, I feel prompted to post a paper I wrote this past spring for a class called Ministry Among the Marginalized. I'm going to chop it up into several chewable pieces to appear over the next couple of weeks. I hope it busts some myths, guides your imagination toward paths of action, and in some small way shines the light of the gospel on an issue of our day.

You can expect part one next week.

Blessings my friends, and may the spirit of our Lord who new what it meant to have no place to lay his head be with you.

Vote for Shalom!

With the holiday shopping season in full swing, I thought I'd share this little documentary.

I'm all for buying gifts for people, it's a beautiful way to love others (though making stuff is awesome too). But let's be conscious of our purchases this year, remembering that ever dollar spent is quite literally a vote for the kind of world we live in.

Vote for a world that reflects the God whose entrance into the world we celebrate this time of year.

Vote for shalom!

From the Thesis

Thought I'd pull a little excerpt from my slowly developing thesis for your reading pleasure. Enjoy!




When Thomas Jefferson arrived in Paris as the newest delegate from the United States, he moved through the city with confidence that belied the youth of his nation. Jefferson relocated to France with his eldest daughter Martha--whom they all called Patsy--in July 1785 bearing, primarily, the responsibility to broker trade deals with his hosts and other European nations. In two brief years since the Treaty of Paris was signed and the Revolutionary War came to a close, the United States had quickly emerged as a state with whom the world must reckon. Militarily the U.S. eked out a victory on home turf, much thanks due their French allies, but the late eighteenth century was an era when naval power defined true might. Everyone knew the U.S. fleet was a shadow of their counterparts across the Atlantic. 

Jefferson’s plomb drew from a new source, one that had already risen as the defining feature on the geopolitical scene: economic power. It was no secret that the New World was a treasure chest of sorely lacking commodities in Europe, and the American ability to exploit its ecological gifts was burgeoning. But this was not the primary mode of profit on the middling diplomat’s mind.

Two months before arriving in Paris, Jefferson was present as the Congressional Congress’s ratified the Land Ordinance of 1785. It was an adaptation of a plan he put forward as representative for Virginia the previous year. As the chief architect behind its elegantly simple, seemingly destined, though ultimately diabolical strategy, Jefferson knew the United States was about to be a very wealthy nation. 

The land claimed by the thirteen colonies more than doubled after the Revolution. To the Founding Fathers, this presented an enormous opportunity dilemma: millions of acres of ‘unsettled’ territory. Sprawling to their west all the way to the Mississippi River (the other side was claimed by Spain) the settlers saw vacant, open wilderness. For Jefferson it was the perfect moment to begin enacting his vision for a nation of yeoman farmers. He and others “devised a plan whereby all the vacant unclaimed land in the young republic could be divided into an almost infinite number of squares, each of them a square mile, or 640 acres--more than enough to satisfy the average would-be settler” (Jennings, 225, quoting Jackson, A Sense of Place, A Sense of Time). Each plot would then be sold off by the government as pure profit. The Public Land Survey System, as it was called, was used to reduce the complexities of thousands of bioregions and Native civilizations to abstract geometry available for purchase. Its methodology was extended with zeal under Jefferson’s presidency as massive new quantities of land entered U.S. control through the Louisiana purchase, and it continued to shape the parceling of nature into property until Manifest Destiny reached its westward terminus. “In this US system, unique among colonial powers, land became the most important exchange commodity for the accumulation of capital and building of the national treasury” (Dunbar-Ortiz, 124). Anyone looking out a plane window today can still see Jefferson’s vision stamped over ancient, disjunctive soil in the patchwork grid of fields and roads so familiar on the middle-American landscape.

Implications abound from the Land Ordinance of 1785, but for now we must simply note that our third president had no concept of America as place. He followed a storied tradition of treating land outside white-European control like space. Colonists saw the New World as a vacuum Domicilium, open and available to their ‘civilizing’ inhabitation. Just before departing with merchants of the Massachusetts Bay Company, Puritan minister John Cotton preached on the settler’s logic: “In a vacant soyle hee that taketh possession of it, and bestoweth culture and husbandry upon it, his Right it is.” The tragic irony is, of course, that many peoples did possess the soil, participated in a rich cultural world, and practiced a complex system of husbandry that, while opaque to most settlers, had cultivated the unprecedented ecological abundance on display for the earliest explorers. 

“Since the particular had no place in the hierarchy of values developed in the post-Enlightenment world, studies of place were often relegated to ‘mere description’ while space was given the role of developing scientific law-like generalizations. In order to make this work people had to be removed from the scene. Space was not embodied but empty” (Cresswell, 34). This philosophical turn to space was excellent at opening the possibility for totalizing projects like Thomas Jefferson’s. Empty space--quite opposite populated, storied place--can make no demands on you. As an ethical void, it can make no claims of truth, value, or morality and is thus free to be filled by whatever the newcomer brings. When space was married to (and eventually subsumed under) a unidirectionally posited theory of time, they collaborated in the minds of Euro-Americans to offer an abstract setting for “progress.” Spacetime became a ravenous, unexamined lie buried in the mind of the colonizer. With its categories the coordinates were charted toward fresh vistas of Manifest Destiny, racial and class segregation, ecological destruction, and globalization. 

Decolonizing ourselves to inhabit the co-creative rhythms of human vocation requires us to once again look upon the land as shared place.

Focal Points

The Colorado State Capitol Building lines up with
the city's downtown street grid. It's also a gathering
spot for many of the city's homeless. (pic circa 1950)

Cities designed thoughtfully are filled with focal points. 

Even careless city plans have them in some shape or form. Whether parks, monuments, or significant buildings (public, private and religious architecture all fulfill this function and are a strong indicator of value expression at different points in a city's history), these become the visual reference points that help people orient themselves within the complexities of urban space and hold an "image of the city" (to use Lynch's phrase) in their mind. Sometimes focal points show up as a cluster of skyscrapers. Other times they appear as a strategically placed building at the end of a major boulevard. Whatever they are, these focal points draw our eyes and our bodies to them self and professes to the world what we find most important.

Focal places also function in a very interesting secondary role: they form the city's prime public spaces.

In the modern, capitalist city, public space is often inhabited by the poor. Private space outside the home is mostly geared toward consumption and profit generation in today's urban areas. Thus, the poor have limited private space available to them thanks to their limited purchasing and profit generating power. What's left are the public places available to anyone (though, increasingly, policies are being passed to oust unwanted folks from these places too). Imagine the parks and plaza's in your city's downtown. Who is seated and standing around capital buildings and courts, churches and office buildings? More often than not, this is where we find the homeless and those characters the dominant culture attempts to exclude.

I find it amazing that Jesus associated himself with exactly these people: the excluded, the disinherited, the barred from entry, the kept outside. Where you see the hungry and ignored, there, we are told, you see Jesus.

In the past, when I've thought about the focal design of our cities, the things we have centered our built environment and subsequently our lives around, I'm often saddened. At these center points we find the constructions of empire. The power of our government and financial institutions are set on full display. I have often worried that this leads us away from the true center, Jesus. And I have worried that this construction wordlessly teaches our imagination to value the wrong things.

But could it be that, ever so subtly, the presence of the poor in these places is subverting what the world has tried to place is the middle? That in the grimy faces of the poor, Jesus has planted himself at the center of our social worlds? Perhaps if we look down from the corner offices and emblems of power, if we can listen with humility, we will rediscover a more beautiful way to be human. We will find Jesus at the center, standing among the poor.