“The home is the center of life. It is a refuge from the grind of work, the pressure of school, and the menace of the streets. We say that at home, we can “be ourselves.” Everywhere else, we are someone else. At home, we remove our masks.
The home is the wellspring of personhood. It is where our identity takes root and blossoms, where as children, we imagine, play, and question, and as adolescents, we retreat and try. As we grow older, we hope to settle into a place to raise a family or pursue work. When we try to understand ourselves, we often begin by considering the kind of home in which we were raised.”
― Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
I read this quote this afternoon, and it really struck me that this is very heart of the housing issue. Without a home, a safe place to let down your cares of the day, to regroup and re-energize, ….there can be no stability, nothing sustainable – you live your life in limbo, slowly, or sometimes not so slowly, losing everything – your belongings, your health, your connections.
I believe that Housing is a human right, that in a place like the United States, like Pennsylvania, like Montgomery County, where there are more than enough resources, there should be housing for everyone. But even if you don’t think the way that I do, if you really look at what happens to someone without a home, you can’t help but see how just wasteful it is, to allow situations, every day, where people lose everything they have, and have to dig their way out of an impossible hole to even get back to some kind of existence in which they can catch their breath.
We have a crisis here, that we have to address now – housing is unaffordable to a growing number of people here in the county. Every day at HopeWorx, we receive calls from people who have run out of options, who are desperately trying to find a way to make their rent payments, or trying to find a landlord that will accept their voucher or a landlord who doesn’t require that they make three times or more of what the rent is. I hear all the time from people that “I talked to the people living in tents, and they won’t accept help”. I’m trying to figure out what help it is that folks are allegedly not accepting. Did someone offer them an apartment, a safe home, or did they offer to refer them to resources…….magical resources that will suddenly give them an acceptable credit report and a clean background check, a steady, sustainable income source that is large enough to afford an apartment? If someone here has those magical resources, I hope they can give them to me so I can share them with my staff, who field these calls every day. We work every day to connect people with no stability in their housing, no home, with mental health resources, addiction treatment resources, job placement resources, and housing resources. As peer advocates, we do everything we can to walk beside people and help them to access the resources that are available to them. But, I can tell you, its getting harder. And harder. Without a home, without a respite, the journey to taking any other steps to dig out of the hole of homelessness is long and gets longer every day.
I lost a friend two years ago when he died, alone, on the steps of a church. I’d known him for 25 years, and for most of that time he was a scrappy couch surfer who never made quite enough money to sustain his own place, but he was really good at being a good friend, a good person to have around, especially in a crisis. But, he hit a rough patch, had a personal crisis that most people could have figured out if they had a place to regather their strength. I had moved to a different town, and …he didn’t reach out for help. He didn’t feel connected enough to bother anyone with his troubles. I’ll never stop regretting that I couldn’t keep the connection with him, that I couldn’t give him the respite he needed. Every day now, when I am interacting with people who come to our community center seeking daytime respite so that they can get through another night living outside, I worry about every sign I see in each person, of them slowly losing their connections. What I hope we can commit to here tonight, is for all of us, everyone who is a member of this community, to connect – to reach out and connect with each other, and do everything we can to help people keep their connections to this community, to the people who sustain them. Because, we need housing, affordable housing, for everyone in Montgomery County and we need it now, because connections are tenuous and without housing, more and more people are losing everything.
1. Freedom is meaningless if people cannot put food in their stomachs, if they can have no shelter, if illiteracy and disease continue to dog them. – Nelson Mandela
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