Coming face to face with the homeless in our community

Each year, my parish takes part in a wonderful program in Contra Costa County that houses homeless families at local churches. For two weeks, families pitch tents in our church gymnasium, where they spend their nights. Members of the church community take turns preparing meals and offering spiritual and material sustenance. At the end of the two weeks, the families pack up their tents and sleeping bags and move on to another local church. The program starts in October and often runs until the summer.

I took part in the program at Christ the King in Pleasant Hill this year, hauling 15 enchiladas that my wife baked to the final night of the families' stay, where I and others shared with them a Mexican-themed meal (there were no shortage of people going for seconds). I had the privilege of helping to serve the families and children, who despite their poor circumstances, smiled broadly and expressed a degree of gratitude that I found touching.

As rewarding as the experience was, it was also troubling, and difficult, to see so many children without a permanent place to call home. This just wasn't right. Every child in our country should lay down to sleep at night in a warm bed, not in sleeping bags in church gym, or worse. As the richest society in the world, we can and must do better than this.

 As I talked to the program director while eating dinner, I saw a portrait of the homeless in our community that flew in the face of preconceptions I've often had over the years. In many cases, these are hard-working parents who either have jobs or want them, and yet they simply don't have the resources to put a roof over their head. While it's easy to associate the homeless with mental illness or substance abuse, many are simply victims of the cruel lack of affordable housing in the Bay Area. It's not uncommon, the program director told me, for two parents to have jobs but be relegated to living out of their cars because their incomes simply can't pay for the sky-high rents in the area. These are people who work hard, play by the rules, and yet are left to live on our streets because of one bad break, or a lack of a safety net when they lose their home to no fault of their own.

As we talked, I couldn't help but become angry thinking about how easily this problem could be solved if only we committed to building sufficient affordable housing in our communities. But as I learned in my years as a journalist, "affordable housing" is an ugly term for many local leaders and residents who associate it with crime, blight and lowered property values. The fight for affordable housing appears to be no match for the power of NIMBYism and self-interest.

It's a shame that those who so vigorously fight any attempt to bring affordable or low-income housing into their communities don't see first-hand the results of their actions: families living in cars, or in tents in church gymnasiums. I wonder if they experienced what I experienced during the Winter Nights program, might they have a change of heart?

Maybe, maybe not. As I've seen with so many social issues lately, people tend to form their facts around what they already believe, rather than the other way around. And the sad truth is that in so many arenas, from gun violence to immigration to climate change, ideology has trumped compassion and pragmatism.

Then again, there's no better way to instigate action than to put a human face on a problem. And if the reality of children sleeping in tents because we're afraid that creating more housing will inconvenience our quality of life isn't enough to wake people up, I'm not sure what will.