The Homeless: Part III - The Poor Will Be With You Always

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 three blogs ago) prompted me to republish it here. This is part 3.

The Poor Will Be With You Always

Like good moderns, we believe that there are “natural laws” that irrefutably establish how reality works: Newtonian physics, Locke’s “social contract,” and most importantly, the unseen hand of the market. In modernity’s worldview, “the human is considered essentially an economic being, homo economicus. Consequently, the arrangement of economic matters is believed to be the wellspring of contentment or discontent in all other areas of life” (Spretnak, 40). Twentieth century geopolitics were a clash around this narrow pivot point, battling for which economic system--capitalism, socialism or communism--should have preeminence. Unfortunately, no matter how you slice the cake, when humans are reduced to econs that must play by certain rules, major consequences ensue:

“US capitalism is characterized not just by the existence of competition but also by the belief in competition as a mechanism for social progress. Moreover, in order to define success, the system must believe in and rely on poverty as a natural and just state, as an outgrowth of corrupt individuals, that is to say those who are lazy and deviant. Poverty is US capitalism’s grand punishment and a threat that is supposed to motivate citizens to participate and succeed” (Wasserman and Clair, 6).

Because the competitive mechanism and the “unseen hand of the market” have been christened holy laws guiding society toward progress, side effects like homelessness are simply dismissed as unfortunate but necessary byproducts of “the way things are.” As long as GDP is on the rise, this argument goes, the economy is considered a success. There will always be those who cannot win in life’s economic competitions, so we must simply accept the poor and homeless, throw some charity their way, and encourage them to work harder. Any thought of a wholesale elimination of homelessness is therefore anathema to this brand of neoclassical capitalism.

A similar strand of passive acceptance lurks within Christian folk beliefs. Based on only two verses, many Christians fatalistically believe the bible teaches that society cannot avoid poverty. Deuteronomy 15:11 states that “there will always be poor people in the land.” Jesus seems to reiterate this idea in Matthew 26:11 and Mark 14:7 when he says, “The poor you will always have with you but you will not always have me.” These passages, taken out of context as I have done here, are used as the normative hermeneutic principle when considering poverty either elsewhere in scripture or in society. While the context of each verse alone does much to dismiss turning these into universal claims for human society, the overarching narrative of the bible rules it out completely. “The most important observation about the material world to emerge from the creation account in Genesis 1 is that God created it good” (Blomberg, 34). From the beginning, God’s intentions are set toward a world order in which all can flourish. Once humanity fell into sin and poverty entered the world, he continually provided means for restoration. From the tithe and sacrificial system that provided a social safety net (whose statutes frame Deut 15:1), to the redistributive Sabbath and Jubilee practices, to the prophets who continually called Israel to uphold these statutes of justice, to Jesus’ ministry of solidarity and liberation for the oppressed, to the early Church’s communal sharing of property, to John’s revelation of a New Creation in which all have joy and a home in the city of God, the bible is continually rejecting systems of oppression.

The American political economy is not a natural law embedded in the fabric of the cosmos. Nor are the poor simply a fact of the world like the blue shades of the sky. Homelessness is the result of the system we have created. It is not the poor’s destiny. It is our choice.

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.

Which Economy Will You Choose?

(This blog was first published at www.sayhelloadvertising.com/blog. It's an amazing business providing work opportunities and professional growth to folks in the Fresno, CA inner city...check it out!)

Work and the Economy

The American economy is an incredible thing. It provides room for enormous creativity and diversity. Any idea is welcome in the market, it is just up to you as the business person to make it fly! Our economy has led to unmatched prosperity and a heightened standard of living for millions of people.

Unfortunately, not everyone gets to benefit the same.

Access to opportunity builds on itself. Once I get one good job, it is much easier for me to get another good job because of my improved resume. If my father also had a string of good jobs, our family is better able to prepare me for the same kind of future. Now, if everyone in my neighborhood has had great jobs with a history of success and opportunity, collectively our community becomes highly competitive and predisposed to continue building on our success.

Now imagine that you grew up in a community where no one has ever had one of those "good jobs." Your parents worked minimum wage their whole life and struggled with bouts of unemployment when the economy turned down and "low-skill" workers were laid off. Your neighbors were in the same boat. Most of the kids you go to school with have no one in their family who went to college. You have tried and tried to get a job, but you don't have anything on your resume to get you going. Well, your chances of benefiting from this incredible economy we have would be much lower than mine.

The Ever Widening Gap

Over time, these dynamics of opportunity keep compounding on each other. Those who have a history of opportunity and success are able to keep leveraging their pasts accomplishments for ever greater rewards. And those who have less to build on fall farther and farther behind.

At this point in American history, wealth disparities are back to the record levels set during the Great Depression.

Robert Linthicum lays out the progression in his book Transforming Power:

"[Between 1979 and 1995] high school graduates experience a decline of 17 percent in the buying power of their income. And those who did not graduate form high school had a 27 percent decrease. Meanwhile the CEOs of the one hundred largest companies in the United States each went from an average annual income of 1.3 million dollars to 37.5 million dollars--one thousand times the pay of their production crews! According to a 2002 New York Times Magazine article, "The 13,000 richest families in America had almost as much income (in 1998) as the 20 million poorest households." However, the richest gave 35 percent of all campaign dollars in recent presidential elections."

There's a problem here folks.

The Bible's Thoughts on Inequality

We have to take a hard look at how God feels about people who enjoy the fruits of an economy that denies it's goods to those at the bottom of society.

We should carefully consider God’s attitude toward societies that exclude the weak from participation in and benefit from the rewards of their economic system. In the book of Amos, the prophet rebukes Israel and her neighbors for their injustices. Gaza had sold an entire people into slavery. The Ammonites had committed terrible cruelty, mutilating pregnant women to grow their empire. In the face of all these atrocities, Israel is held at the highest degree of culpability. God will not “revoke the punishment” because his people too have sold the poor for the slightest of profits and shown disregard for their suffering. In valuing wealth over the poor, they engaged in idol worship and marred the holy name of the Lord (2:7-8). The businessmen of the nation extorted the poor through the markets and political rulers taxed them into desperation (5:11). The rich grew richer while the poor grew ever more disenfranchised and powerless. God spoke to the powerful of Israel, critiquing their selfish indulgence, declaring:

“Woe to those who lie on beds of ivory and stretch themselves out on their couches, and eat lambs from the flock and calves from the midst of the stall, who sing idle songs to the sound of the harp and like David invent for themselves instruments of music, who drink wine in bowls and anoint themselves with the finest oils, but are not grieved over the ruin of Joseph! Therefore they shall now be the first of those who go into exile, and the revelry of those who stretch themselves out shall pass away.” (6:4-7)

God instructed his people to “love your neighbor as yourself” (Lev 19:18). Instead, Israel devolved into greed and self-serving injustice.

Today's economic world is eerily similar to Amos'. But the Church and all people of conscience can learn from Israel’s failures. We have an opportunity to reject self-centered economies and create new pathways of inclusion and equitable sharing. Businesses like Say Hello--started by a church--are springing up all over our city, nation, and world. They are choosing a caring economy that works for everyone.

Which economy will you choose?