We’ve heard it repeated dozens of times. “Don’t you know? Homelessness can happen to anyone! After all, studies show that over half of Americans are just one paycheck away from being homeless![1]” Of course, there are aspects to these kinds of statements that we recognize as true. It’s true that virtually everyone’s home is capable of catching on fire and burning to the ground. It’s also true that most Americans live with inadequate savings for the event of emergencies such as the loss of a job or a disruption to our cashflow routines. But is that all it would take for an individual or family to become homeless? Let’s consider some ideas…
In recent years on the West Coast, we have had multiple large-scale fires that have displaced whole communities. Consider the cities of Paradise California and Phoenix Oregon. The Paradise fire over 14,000 homes were destroyed and nearly 3,000 homes were lost in Phoenix. Yet very few of these resulted in people living on our streets. Why? Largely it is because of the strength of wise insurance investments, good relationships with creditors and lenders, and more importantly, good networks of friends and family.
Our local communities may have been temporarily filled with RV’s and travel trailers, yet our streets didn’t become overwhelmed with additional homeless with perhaps one exception. What we personally experienced was a large group of people who were already homeless who migrated to wherever there was fire relief aid being handed out and they pretended to be fire victims in order to get the resources[2].
When we let well intended government “help” agencies reduce problems to simple common denominators such as money or four walls and a roof, we’re likely to follow their example and duplicate their failed “solutions”. We will recklessly give out loads of “aid” focused on small personal comforts and never enough to actually purchase a home. We do this even though those who advocate for a financial solution don’t actually believe that the problem will be solved with finances. If you doubt this, just ask them why don’t they promote bypassing those supervising distribution agencies by giving directly to those who claim to be homeless? They instinctively know that there is more to the problem, but they have rejected the need for a moral guide required to fix it.
Imagine that we took a similar approach to hunger by focusing on how much easier it is to eat food with forks and concluding that we could solve hunger by simply providing starving populations with an abundance of forks. We’d likely find loads of used, bent and broken forks tossed into the bushes, roadsides, and water ways. We would hear slogans like, “Many Americans are simply one paycheck away from foodlessness! Hunger could happen to anybody!” Government think tanks would start campaigns with catchy titles like “Forks First”, and many of us would look at each other and nod our heads in common sense approval. While it’s perfectly true that forks do make eating easier and that most people who eat food use them, a fork is useless without food.
Having worked with thousands of homeless individuals, my staff and I have come to the conclusion that the overwhelming majority of them have been making choices for a very long time that can only lead to homelessness. These choices have predated their current financial and material economy, but primarily have to do with their relational economy. They have long stopped valuing how they impact people around them and they (like Adam and Eve in the garden) shift the blame for the consequences to others. Over time this deteriorates the real and powerful social network of support (family and friends) that most Americans enjoy. This is the primary cause of homelessness, and this is why it doesn’t simply or magically happen to just anyone.
Many of those outside of the Gospel Rescue Mission immediately conclude that it must be our drug & alcohol counseling or rigorous job training that is the secret to our success. The truth is that we see more personal growth in our program participants in their relationship skills than in those other areas (as necessary as they may be). Rediscovering what it means to live in a close community and learning to value those we share a home with can be challenging at first but becomes the glue that holds the rest together. It’s no wonder that Jesus explained that all of the laws in the Bible find their starting point in loving God and loving our neighbor[3].
By: Brian Bouteller, Executive Director
References:
[3]Matthew 22:34-40