What we think we know about homelessness....

With two MAJIC concerts down and six left to go in the season I have had a lot of folks express their doubts about the realistic goal of the Coalition to end homelessness by the end of the year in 2014. As a friend said to me when I told her about the project, "there is a coalition to END! homelessness?"

My response is, "absolutely!" Is seems to me that we first need to change our attitude from assuming that homelessness will always exist to engaging in the process of making permanent housing a right for all people.

Some other typical responses to the the topic of homelessness are somethings like, "oh, yeah, you know that people who are homeless choose to live that way", or "homeless people are just in it so they don't have to get out there and work."

The Grand Rapids Area Housing Continuum of Care recently published a document that provided facts about homelessness in Kent county. It reported that only 10-15% of people who are homeless are chronically homeless. That means that 85-90% of people who are homeless don't chose to live that way. There are any number of circumstances that result in homelessness: physical and mental illness, loss of a job, inability to find a job with a living wage, domestic violence, and inadequate access for help in coping with trauma and/or additions.

Here are just a few examples of real homelessness that people in our congregation observed during a Sunday night service dialog:

A teacher in our congregation found one of her middle school students sleeping behind the school dumpster. The student couldn't stand to go home any more because of a violent father.

A member of our church spent 15 months living out of his car. He was so sick that he couldn't work and had no other place to go.

NPR did a story a few days ago based on a New York Times article about the rise of the number of Iraq war veterans who are returning to the U.S. and ending up in homeless shelters (see story here) . After experiencing the any number of horrors abroad, they can't find their way back into "normal" society.

It seems that most of us with a permanent shelter to call "home" forget that people who are homeless or on the brink of homelessness are people just like us, and that they deserve the same dignity and rights as the rest of us.