We Need Change

Last Monday, I walked past three or four of our neighbors as they sheltered in the bushes of one of the city parks I visited with my family. They were not just sheltering there but also hiding from Bremerton’s extremely hateful, inhumane, unjust, damaging, and ineffective laws, which, after some recent changes, have made it a crime to be homeless.

I am speculating about their goals a little bit because I didn’t introduce myself to the people I saw last Monday, but it is an educated guess. After fifteen or more years of outreach and eight years directing Northwest Hospitality, I have grown comfortable introducing myself and being a friendly neighbor to people who are often skeptical of strangers for countless valid reasons. I have developed this comfort level because of all of the people this approach to my community has helped me meet. Good friends and stories from the amazing to the terrible have come from seeing the human first when looking at people who struggle in my community. It’s also been helpful that I can usually convince myself that I may have something useful to share with people: supplies, resources, referrals, or simply company and a listening, caring ear.

As I walked past their site on Monday for the second or third time on various trips to the car, I despaired that I had nothing useful to share. I can and do refer people to coordinated entry for housing and other resources until I’m blue in the face, but too many sit on waiting lists for literal years or have been on and off those same lists more times than either of us care to count. I usually ask if they need Narcan, but when I don’t already know them and it’s our first encounter, that question, despite the best of intentions, can easily come off as judgemental and put up walls between people I might be able to connect with more effectively in another way. Being out with family, I was unprepared to provide tents, sleeping bags, blankets, or other basic necessities. I had socks in my car because I never go anywhere without those, and I know how valuable and appreciated those are, but on this particular Monday, the futility of any of these things weighed heavily and kept me from making that connection and beginning those relationships. 

I don’t think that I regret not reaching out, but I can’t say for sure. The difference I would have made may likely have been negligible, but it’s unlikely that it would have been nothing. Most of what we’re able to do through our outreach is relationship-building, which always starts with an awkward introduction. But, I was unable at that moment to do this thing that I have committed years of my life to for two main reasons. First, I was with my family, and I believe that they should get some time with me when I’m not “working.” Second, I was overwhelmed in that moment by the big picture, rather than focusing on the affected people. This is an emotional blockage that, I believe, permits most of the housed people in our communities to look away or to complain rather than to see, connect, and serve people struggling with severe poverty. 

Acquiescing to this overwhelmed feeling is a slippery slope because it leads to a fundamentally flawed conclusion that someone else will find or create solutions - for the people on our corner or to the more significant and overwhelming homelessness crisis in general. While our government is not without fault (not by a longshot) in the current housing and healthcare catastrophe, nor without responsibility to do what they can to serve the most vulnerable in our community, I am convinced that there will never be a legislated solution to homelessness because, at its heart, homelessness is a failure of community not of representative government. At some point along the way, people started expecting someone else to look after the people who need help around us instead of recognizing that responsibility and continuing to step up to it ourselves.

Though both are definitely critical today, we shouldn’t need our community members to donate more to charities or even to volunteer more. It would be much more effective and efficient if individuals would take direct responsibility for their own neighbors’ well-being as well as for their own actions in the face of both extreme poverty and, importantly, extreme wealth. Communities can’t sit back and wait for laws to change the world around them; people need to step up and create the world they want to see. We can influence what is happening around us by choosing how we invest our energies and focus more carefully and by standing up for the values that we claim to support but never actually champion. 

Housing is a human right and cannot be allowed to remain a commodity traded for profit - there are plenty of ways for people to invest their hard-earned money; driving up the cost of shelter should not be one of them. Large trading companies fly the flag of capitalism to justify their earnings but represent the fundamental changes to that system of capitalism that will destroy it for good. Platforms like Uber, Air BnB, and so many others have likewise exploited the healthy capabilities of true capitalism and are also contributing to its ruin.

We need changes to our system that prioritize the values we frequently tout to realize the goals of a healthy community. Families should be able to live comfortably on one income. There is no level of “I worked hard and earned it” that can justify someone bringing in multiple millions of dollars every year - no matter how hard you worked on your startup that turned into a massive venture, you did not work even twice as hard as a single mother holding down two jobs to afford her housing, let alone the hundreds of times harder it would take to justify the income disparity we all accept as normal today.

We need to shame our rich into ending their myopic, single-minded approach to capital growth and expect them to give their wealth and control so communities can heal. Rich people don’t have the right nor the ability to save the world or the human race with their creative use of wealth. We can’t wait for the laws to do it, though; we must make it culturally reprehensible to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars. People who hoard wealth like that should be ridiculed and ostracized, not set up as golden idols to be worshiped and emulated. It is a pathetic weakness, spurred on by faith in a classical version of capitalism that is no longer being realized, to gauge one’s success based on the size of one’s bank account rather than what one does for their community with whatever time and resources they have available. We already acknowledge these true values by lauding community servants every so often with awards but none of that would be necessary if we would stop making it admirable or even acceptable for people to hoard wealth. 

Many people - very frequently people who have much more than they deserve or could possibly have truly earned - are too concerned with what vulnerable people “deserve.” Ironically, the more wealth many people have, the more insecure and threatened by the idea of losing any bit of that wealth and the more offended they are by the idea that someone might get something for nothing. Yet, I’ve lost count of the times I’ve worked with people who carry all their belongings on their back or in their car who lose it all while working their fingers to the bone. They usually just pick up and start over again, working even harder because they have no choice. Nobody has ever succeeded in life without support from their community of one type or another, whether they recognize that or not. Every person deserves a solid, safe roof over their heads AND every person - housed, unhoused, wealthy, and poor - deserves to live in a community where everybody around them is well housed. The only way we get there is by changing our communities from the inside out.