I’ve been getting involved in addressing homelessness in my town, and sat in on a meeting about renovating a house into a women’s shelter. I was struck by how stupidly hard it is to help people get affordable or even emergency housing. It seems like all the wheels of regulation are jammed against any real progress.
So as I thought about the problems with bureaucratic roadblocks, it occurred to me: in this conservative town in which I live, most people don’t want the government to spend their taxes on the poor. Just like I was taught as a young conservative, they have been taught to blame the poor for creating their own problems. As a result, they generally view welfare, or anything that even smells like welfare, as somehow enabling the poor to leech off of society. In his 1976 campaign Ronald Reagan infamously popularized the derogatory image of the “welfare queen,” a Black woman deliberately having child after child to amp up her welfare benefits and live off the largesse of the hard-working taxpayers.
https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/12/20/255819681/the-truth-behind-the-lies-of-the-original-welfare-queen
And that image actually worked really well, and it set the tone for a few generations of conservative voters.
And beyond this, most well-off conservatives REALLY don’t want the unhoused living or sheltered near them. That would adversely affect their property values, of course, and their own pocketbooks – or wealth-building – are naturally more important to them than the welfare of their neighbors who have nothing of their own, and live in a tent and push around their entire belongings in a shopping cart stolen from the nearby grocery store.
And in my town, as in many others around America, those conservatives are solidly in the majority of the voting population. So unsurprisingly, when they elect our County Commissioners and vote on various spending and lawmaking, those conservatives do everything they can to entrench their dislike of welfare and low-cost housing in the legal system and the bureaucracy. As a result, the local policies are set up to make it very hard – stupidly hard – to do much to help the unhoused.
And so as I’ve been getting increasingly involved with the local unhoused population, and sitting in on more and more meetings that try to do something about it, like a local homelessness prevention board, or the shelter renovation meeting, I hear the participants talking about the obstacles they face in their official roles in addressing homelessness. So in the wake of those meetings I have spent a lot of time pondering the topic, and how we got here.
Before I go any further, I should point out that I spent several decades as a staunch political and religious conservative. So some of this analysis is based on thinking back to how I used to view the world, and comparing it to my more recent and more compassionate understanding. I recognize that my sense of this problem may therefore be somewhat skewed by the political shift I’ve undergone, but I don’t think it’s skewed in a meaningful way, because I’ve been paying very close attention in the last few years as I’ve separated myself from that conservative thinking bit by bit, and have begun to carefully think through the various policies and positions I used to take.
Also, I try to use “unhoused” instead of “homeless”, simply because I believe it better communicates something about the condition in which people find themselves, and less about an attribute of the person. It’s not their identity. I made this terminology decision after interviewing an author of a book on homelessness, and he persuaded me that “unhoused” is a better term for a lot of reasons. I’ll use “homelessness” as a noun, but generally “unhoused” when I need the adjective. You can listen to that interview if you want.
As I’ve been pondering homelessness, one particular thing that strikes me is how conservatives tend to think about the issues of welfare and other uses of tax dollars towards the underprivileged.
I’ve discovered that politics is just as dogmatic as religion. Once a party takes a given position, its members willfully align themselves to that position, even if it clashes with something they once believed. Witness, for example, the sudden shift from the Clinton-era Republican mantra of “character is everything” to the Trump era “policies are everything and we will overlook his character.” So people will slavishly align themselves to a point of view, without doing much critical thinking, to keep themselves within their preferred tribe.
One of the foundational motivations of conservatives is that they want to avoid spending money when it doesn’t have a measurable effect. For decades now, since the New Deal era at least, if not longer, the Republican Party has made a cornerstone of its platform a resistance to spending large amounts of money on welfare programs or jobs programs or anything else of similar nature.
And part of that resistance is complaining that welfare is a never-ending, always-growing money pit – and in fact, there’s a related assertion that when you spend money on welfare, it creates more need for welfare by creating a dependent class of people. I won’t bother with the truth of that assertion right now, other than to say I fully believed it for decades, but I don’t believe it any longer.
So when the Republican Party, home to American conservatives, declares that welfare is bad, because it creates more welfare, the conservatives will naturally align themselves to that political dogma, because, in their mind, giving money to someone without getting anything in return is fundamentally a broken policy.
And here’s the core of it: I think that conservatives are fundamentally unwilling to spend any money that they believe doesn’t “fix” something. And they at least do recognize that we can’t “fix” poverty in many cases, so they see it as a waste of money at best, or harmful at worst, because they have grown to believe that welfare just creates more welfare dependency.
So in a town like mine, the deck is stacked against anyone trying to actually help the poor people. And more than that, it’s stacked REALLY hard against the poor people, the unhoused, those with mental and health problems that prevent them from basic living wages and conditions. They end up being the ones who take the hit from these policies.
Well, given that I used to be a devoted conservative Republican, I heard these anti-welfare talking points many, many times – probably a few times a week, as an avid Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity listener for years. And I even used those talking points many times myself.
I really wish I could go back and have a conversation with younger me. I’d patiently show myself the data that proves so many of these ideas wrong. I’d show myself how the data I was using to justify these policies was cherry-picked to make the case for shutting down nearly all public-assistance programs. I’d ask younger me to think through the money trail, where those welfare savings would actually go, which rich people they’d benefit, at the cost of millions of lives destroyed.
But I can’t do that.
So today, all I can do is try to persuade people like younger me that I was wrong. But in this increasingly bifurcated world, where people pick their own media echo chambers and hear literally nothing that doesn’t agree with their existing conclusions, I really can’t affect more than a few of my closest friends who might actually listen to me sharing data that confounds their conservative worldview.
And I can go testify to the local politicians, and share data that might possibly get them to reconsider some of the harmful policies.
But what else can I do? The only thing I can see to do at this point, aside from changing just a few minds, is to try to navigate the stupid-hard system to do some good in this world.
You see, Jesus said the poor will always be with us. And from what I’ve seen, it’s true. There is, and always will be, a segment of population that just can’t make it on their own, for a multitude of reasons that are simply not their fault. And we have to decide whether or not we’re going to follow Jesus’ example and the instruction that is consistent throughout the entire Bible about how we treat the poor and widows and sick and prisoner.
And so, no matter what tax money we spend on welfare or housing or shelters or food banks, the problem won’t go away.
So I want to focus for a few minutes on the homelessness problem, more so than welfare.
When I started talking about this problem on social media, someone (unsurprisingly) replied that these unhoused people just needed to get off their butts and get a job and “get back on their feet and stay there.” In their mind, all unhoused people were unmotivated bums.
Okay, in a perfect world, with fully able humans, and with no mental illness, and no entrenched medical issues, maybe that would be a good point.
But it’s just not the way our world works.
As I’ve spent time over the last three years frequently interacting with the unhoused people in my county, both at a local homeless shelter, and in a program that gives nightly shelter to people in the coldest winter months, I’ve discovered that there are really two categories of shelter: emergency and long-term.
There are always some clients who are in the emergency “I lost my income and have no housing until I get a new job” group. It’s an emergent crisis for them, and hopefully, once they get a new job, they’ll recover their stability and be back into stable housing. So we triage those people and try to sustain them through that gap.
But there are also a lot more unhoused people of a different category than the emergency-homeless group. These are the long-term shelter clients who have permanent debilitating issues which they simply cannot control and cannot fix, and which no amount of money or government assistance will remedy. Helping them “get on their feet and stay there” is flat-out, unquestionably, IMPOSSIBLE.
I know my former conservative tribe won’t like that statement, but I assure you, it’s true.
Most of them seem pretty normal… until you spend some time with them, and you discover they’re deeply delusional, or have other true mental health issues, and they’ll never be able to hold a solid job, much less one that pays a true living wage. It took me two lunch trips and a couple hours of discussion with Melvin (not his real name), for example, to realize that while he presented nearly perfectly normal – we had some neat conversations about the Gospel and about his family – he had an internal thought life that bore very little resemblance to reality. But he hid it well. I didn’t realize until AFTER the second lunch that Melvin’s stories really changed every time I talked to him. First he told me about getting shot in the back of the head and surviving. The next time he had a story about someone hitting him with a hammer in the back of the head. I thought he was telling me different stories; in fact, I now believe he was telling me a different version of the same story in his mind. And each time, Melvin really, TRULY believed the truth of what he was telling me that time. But despite those crazy stories, I’m convinced there was not a bone of intentional deception in his body.
So for someone like my friend Melvin, it’s clear nobody will hire him – and if they do, he’d not last a week. And I’m pretty sure that even high-priced medical care wouldn’t fix his issues enough to stay employed. And he has nobody to care for him; his kids ghosted him years ago. He’s solo and will NEVER “get on his feet,” EVER.
Or consider Lucy. She is a delightful little old lady, very friendly to talk to, but not all mentally there any longer. She fell on hard times a decade ago when she got ill, and is permanently disabled now, in her late 70s. Her kids are dead, and she is widowed. She can’t drive. And she can’t get around without a walker. With no money or property, she can’t afford long-term care. She’s far too old and crippled for a job that would pay enough for housing. So she has no chance of supporting herself.
Melvin and Lucy and folks like them are the ones well and truly in “the poor will always be with you” category. We can’t write them off, we can’t disappear them, we can’t just export them… so the reality is that we simply must budget some of our tax dollars on their behalf.
This is what I mean by the inadequacy of a conservative mindset wanting to fix things. There’s just NO way to FIX these people in any way that they won’t need life-long care.
Years ago, such people were committed to asylums, where at least they got daily shelter and food. But it came at a horrible cost: total loss of their liberty, and conditions in those asylums were often abhorrent. And so over a few decades, compassion prevailed and those asylums were shut down, one by one.
But the result was the expulsion onto the streets of all those people, and there was absolutely nowhere for them to go.
And my local housing office has a seven year waiting list for housing, and they shut down new applications because they were so far behind.
Part of my conservative experience was the line that the government shouldn’t doing that work anyway; it should be the churches. I heard and used that line for years.
But now I look at churches, and realize that’s an absolute lie.
The average megachurch spends literally 99% of its money on everything other than caring for its community. With multi-million dollar budgets, they spend around 1% of their donations to help anyone outside their own doors.
If these churches actually wanted to address homelessness, they could.
But they don’t, because the average conservative attending one of those churches actually wants the money spent on themselves, in some fashion: better-paid staff, nicer building, better sound system and lighting, maybe even a business jet for the globe-trotting star pastor. All things to make their church experience more comfortable.
And “comfortable” most certainly doesn’t include homeless people coming into the building on Sunday mornings. Nosirree, that would be most unwelcome. The few times that happened at my former church, elders were assigned to tail them around the building to keep an eye on them, and basically made to feel quite unwelcome. Make them a meal? Heavens, no; that might make them want to come back NEXT Sunday also, and we can’t be attracting homeless people like that. Finally they were taken outside the front doors for a conversation: “Come back on Monday and talk to the office to see if they can help you.”(Pay no mind to their lack of transportation: they’re here now, and so are we, but we want them to come back another day when only the staff has to see them? How heartless. How uncompassionate.)
So what about the assertion that people will just waste the money we spend on them? That’s another common talking point: if we give money to unhoused people, or we give them free food and housing, they’ll spend their money on drugs or liquor.
Well, what of it? So what?
I’ve started paying attention to what Jesus said – if a man asks you for something, give it to him. Period, full stop, no questions. Jesus did NOT say “first find out if he’s worthy.”
I realized I’d been making that mistake all my life: I wouldn’t give a dollar to a bum, or go help at a soup kitchen, because I couldn’t be sure they really deserved the help.
But now I don’t even ask. Someone says they need money, at the very least I will walk into the nearest fast food joint with them and buy them a meal, no questions asked. Or I’ll hand them a McDonald’s gift card I keep in my car at all times now. And I don’t worry that the people at the soup kitchen might not REALLY need the meal. Sorry, their morality is between them and God, not for me to deal with; I’m here to bless them and treat them exactly like Jesus did: I don’t think there are any examples in the Gospels where He asked whether they needed it. He just gave, blessed, healed.
And I don’t like the common retort “but Jesus knew their hearts and didn’t do it unless they needed it.” I reply: Show me one single example where he really turned someone away. Even after telling the Canaanite woman that His ministry was to the Jews and not the dogs, He STILL met her needs. I’ve got to follow His example, not my rationalizations. The writers of the Gospels chose how to portray Jesus, and if they’d seen examples where He turned away undeserving people, they didn’t share those stories with us. We’ve got to take Jesus at His example, as it was recorded in the Gospels: when someone asked Him for something, it was given. Period.
But they’re still all substance abusers, you say?
Here’s my problem with that assertion: it’s completely wrong.
I know and serve real unhoused people. Many of them are totally sober and not substance abusers. About a third of them are only temporarily unhoused because of lost jobs or medical debt etc. Of the other two thirds, many are unhoused because of serious mental illness, not coupled with substance abuse. In other words, I believe this all-abusers picture of the problem is highly incorrect.
But homeless people frequently refuse shelter, you say? Some places have written laws to arrest homeless people who repeatedly refuse the offer of a shelter; surely that’s good, right?
No, actually not. There are actually a lot of reasons that people refuse offers of shelter, as this article points out.
https://brightenthecorner.org/2023/02/12/why-some-people-avoid-homeless-shelters/
Sometimes it’s because they, just like anyone, doesn’t like to be coerced. Sometimes they don’t want to sit through another sermon. And sometimes, they just really don’t want to be with other homeless people.
The ratio of drug users does depend on the area, with certain places experiencing much higher drug problems – and the unhoused druggies tend to accumulate in those areas. But the clean and sober unhoused people simply don’t want to be around them – which is why they often refuse housing
And note that those high-homelessness, high-drug areas are where most of the news about homelessness originates. You’re seeing a very, very lopsided picture if you’re not personally working with the unhoused.
So I’d gently suggest to anyone who insists on the universality of drug and alcohol abuse problems and constant refusal of help, that we might benefit from actually going and serving at a local homeless shelter, or helping conduct the homelessness counts that most locales do periodically. Go meet the people. Take a couple of them out to lunch or dinner and spend time actually talking with them – and more importantly, actually listening without judging them. Find out what we’re missing in our assessment of the problem.
And by the way, there’s a big difference between a soup kitchen and a homeless shelter. I serve at both. A soup kitchen serves mostly housed people. In any case, there’s a huge difference between filling someone’s plate, versus actually sitting down and getting to know them, to take time after serving them to love them personally. It’s too easy to look at them with disdain or disgust, even while serving them, and walk away from the serving without learning a single thing about them or their stories.
I’m personally convinced, after a few years of being involved in this ministry, that simply having close contact with them will completely change anyone’s mind about their character, their nature, their situations, and their true needs.
In short, all the assertions by most conservatives about the homelessness problem and its solutions are utterly misinformed and actually dangerous.
In fact, I think it’s arguable, from the data I’ve seen, that conservative policies actually make things WORSE, not better. The truth is that it’s actually far cheaper for the government to simply house unhoused people, than to pay for all the costs of dealing with them in a unhoused condition, including increased medical costs, crime and incarceration costs, etc.. Numerous studies, and numerous examples from cities all around the nation and the world, consistently show that fewer tax dollars are spent when we just swallow our desire to “fix” people, and instead simply house them.
This is partly because of a very simple, and easily understood, yet usually ignored fact: when someone is unhoused, it dramatically damages their emotional and physical health. And in those conditions, quite a few people become susceptible to addictive and self-destructive behaviors.
In other words, being unhoused creates a spiral for many people: it leads them into worse conditions, which make it even less likely that they can get into a stable job and housing situation again… which makes their emotional and physical health worse, and on and on.
On the other hand, simply getting people housed eliminates most of these pressures, and increases the chances that they will successfully get off and stay off the streets, and back to supporting themselves.
So if we really want to be conservative with our tax dollars, ignoring homelessness is NOT the right answer. And neither is telling an unhoused person to suck it up and get a job. Because… they can’t, most of them. Unless we simply provide quality reliable housing, they’re going to be a significant burden on the budget for life. Housing them isn’t cheap, but it’s cheap-ER than what conservative districts like my town are doing.
So we need to find a way to break through all those stupid-hard barriers against helping homeless people. We need more low-cost housing. We need to break the NIMBY barrier and get that housing in areas where services are available, not hiding in the far corners of the county. We need to motivate people to participate in homeless shelter ministry, so that they learn the reality about the problem – and the wonderful homeless people made in God’s image that are being served.
I’ll close with this observation: if you add up all the tax breaks that well-to-do people get – a home mortgage deduction, energy efficiency appliance rebates, low- or zero-emission vehicle rebates, education credits, health insurance tax credits – the average middle-to-upper-class person gets plenty of free handouts from the government. It’s just not called “welfare.” But we sure feel entitled about it all, don’t we?
Maybe we can have a little more grace towards those who truly desperately need it, and be willing to spend a bit more of our tax dollars to dramatically change the world for THEM.
As the story goes of the boy walking down the beach throwing beached starfish back into the water, we might not be able to save every starfish. But we CAN save some of them, and for those that we can save, it means everything. Let’s be like that.
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