Homeless

In a huge DeKalb County conference room this morning. There are a dozen elected and appointed leaders in the front, and about 100 community members in the audience. The subject is homelessness.

DeKalb County, where I’ve lived for 15 years, does a terrible job helping homeless people find stability. The meeting is designed to bring stakeholders together to plan for a different, better future. I’m here because our church had a difficult experience hosting a free fridge on our campus; the fridge welcomed all people, including unhoused people, to get something to eat, but those folks had nowhere else to go and ended up living on the church’s campus. Neighbors got pissed. The county offered no coherent assistance, no shelter, no responsive mental health supports for people in crisis.

People lose their homes all the time—it’s normal. But being homeless is a societal choice. We choose it when there is no municipal housing strategy and no coherent continuum of care.

Homelessness is a housing problem. The problem is plain: the market sucks at providing housing, especially for people with low incomes. The private housing market is great at providing housing for people at higher incomes—which is defensible from a money-making perspective, but indefensible from a moral perspective. The public sector has to be involved to stimulate, incentivize, and build housing for people who make $70K a year and less. DeKalb County is finally developing a housing plan to create a coherent county-wide housing plan. It has to get better. It can’t get worse.

The Continuum of Care is the HUD-designated entity that provides the bulk of funding for homeless services. In DeKalb County, the CoC isn’t coherent—they parcel out dollars with no strategy.

Churches always have and always will have a role in addressing homelessness. We care, and a bureaucratic response to human suffering without sincere love and care for the human beings involved is brutality. But we churches don’t have the money to create housing or the expertise to provide the case management and health services that people need to move from instability to stability.

Homelessness a symptom of a larger problem: we live in a society in which it is easy to fall into poverty and punishing to actually be poor. There is a generalized tolerance for a society structured like this. It could be different. It should be different. Blessed are you who are poor. Let’s make a county, structurally, that reflects that value.