The following essay is reposted from The Other Side.

Housing Comes First?

Ed Loring  

Some years ago I was making pastoral visits on the streets of Atlanta. As I walked up to a vacant lot, I recognized George sitting on a low stone wall that had once been the foundation of a wonderful old house. He and a few friends were drinking beer.

“What’s up, man?” I asked in my best predestined Presbyterian pastor’s tongue.

“Bad, Rev, bad,” George mourned as he slipped the quart bottle behind his bent back.

A few days earlier, George had gotten a decent job at a local factory. He was all smiles then. On Monday, his first day, he worked diligently with renewed hope in his heart.

Monday evening, George walked to a men’s shelter for the night. Tired but still happy, he ate his sandwiches, then found his way to a sleeping mat. As he lay there, the quiet was punctured by rustling, snoring, coughing, and the occasional moans of men who dream of families lost or left behind, only to be awakened by a shove and a gruff “Shut up! I can’t sleep!”

George slept little. At 5:00 a.m., the lights flashed on; he pulled himself from the floor, dressed, and stepped onto the street. A few minutes later, the sky opened up, drenching him in a downpour. He ran under the eaves of an old warehouse, waited while the heavens got hold of themselves, then set out again for the factory.

“You’re late,” his boss growled.

“Got caught in the rain.”

“That’s no way to hold onto a job. Now get busy.”

In mid-afternoon George began nodding. (He hadn’t slept in a bed for two months.) A voice jolted him: “George! What gives, man? Did you party last night? Stay awake.”

“Yes, sir,” George said. But he barely managed to keep his eyes open until quitting time. Then he returned to the shelter for a repeat of the previous night.

On Wednesday George fell asleep and was fired. On Thursday I chanced upon him, his heart filled with despair and his belly filling with beer.

“If I just had a place to live,” George moaned, “I could have gotten enough sleep and kept my job.”

What I learned that day profoundly shaped my political understanding. George taught me a radical insight, subsequently confirmed by hundreds of other homeless persons: Housing precedes life. It ranks right up there with another radical insight I’d learned even earlier: Jesus loves everyone. Combined, these two could be the foundation for a new community of dignity and sufficiency.

But even those of us who are convinced of Jesus’ love frequently persist in ignoring the primacy of housing. We devise programs to generate employment, overcome addiction, and improve education and healthcare; we evangelize and work for social justice. But all this is undermined by our failure to recognize that housing must come first.

Housing precedes employment. In the United States, you cannot live in a house until you’ve earned the rent money. Job training, literacy initiatives, self-esteem programs, all assume that housing will follow employment. But George’s experience indicates otherwise: You cannot hold a job or build a life until you have housing.

The cheap labor and temporary employment that drive the U.S. economy demand a steady supply of new workers. So policy-makers and corporate bigwigs are unwilling to interrupt the flow by first providing housing for the people who fill those jobs. But putting employment before housing fits the needs of employers, not workers. The same revolving door that fills the slots in the factories is chewing up the people who pass through it.

Housing precedes sobriety. Many varied and loving programs help folks fight addictions. But success in getting and remaining sober or clean is almost impossible without housing. The despair and physical suffering of homelessness blunt the desire to enter such programs and weary the muscles of self-discipline required to persevere. Instead, drink and drugs are ever available to fend off the degradation and pain of homelessness.

Those who manage to get through a detox program have a chance at a new start. But that fades quickly when they are thrown back into a labor pool where liquor seems the only way to get through eight hours of mindless work at minimum wage, and into shelters filled with booze. It’s like spitting into the wind.

Housing precedes education. Children who come to shelters in the evening find little space and no quiet, making study and concentration impossible. The same is true for adults in literacy programs, job training, or remedial education. Without a house there is no place to think and dream, to read about a better life, to listen to the beauty and wisdom of our ancestors.

Denied an environment where they can anchor the day’s learning and keep up with their classmates, homeless children struggle against staggering odds. Their adult counterparts must tote books and papers as they shuffle between soup-kitchen lines and crowded shelters. It’s easier just to drop out.

Housing precedes health. All the clinics in the world cannot protect against sleeping outdoors in rain, sleet, and snow, or indoors where the still air holds the germs that latched onto people who, during the day, had no access to toilet facilities or shelter from the weather. Mentally ill people on the streets lack the structure that would ensure control of their illness through medication, or prevent them from being a danger to themselves and others. The religious Right’s famous “family values” evaporate when parents and children never have a space to call their own or the stability that lets them pay attention to more than simple survival.

Housing precedes evangelization. Even the ancient wanderers in the desert and hermits living in caves had a community to welcome and refresh them. Today’s wanderers are on the streets of our cities; today’s hermits live on heating grates and in cardboard boxes. The church can and should offer them the nurturing of the Beloved Community. But no church ought to call someone to accept Jesus Christ until it is ready to bring that person into a house and assist in the arduous task of making that house a home.

Housing precedes the justice struggle. As a social activist, I am troubled when I hear grass-roots organizers proclaiming that only the homeless can help themselves, or criticizing them for their lack of political initiative. I want to ask: How do people harness economic and social forces for justice and equality if they lack a place where they can gather, an address where they can be found, a room where they can install telephones and store supplies?

When housing does not precede life itself, fear develops. The brother or sister without a home becomes a criminal and an enemy. People who might help build and maintain affordable housing instead become vociferous advocates for prisons.

We must turn our lives and hearts around. We must build a social policy and culture that are rooted in housing for everyone. If we don’t, our hearts will continue to harden, our political analysis will fail to have meaning, our lives will be eaten by fear and devoured by hate. For the sake of love, for the sake of life, we cannot let that happen.

 Reposted from The Other Side Online, © 2002 The Other Side, May-June 2002, Vol. 38, No. 3.