The Spirituality of Homelessness
The most intensely gentrified city in America, my hometown’s popularity means construction proliferates ‘round every corner. My neighborhood walks, therefore, are political. I gander daily at the manifestation of racial capitalism in the interruption of vistas by cranes, in the beeps of reversing trucks, in the blasts of compressed air.
My teenage summers as a contractor’s assistant afford me slightly more insight into the daily minutia of homebuilding than most. I notice the sequencing, at least, and how precariously simple are the steps necessary for structural integrity. To build a foundation, for example, you dig a rectangle, inlay a plastic lining, fill with gravel, then concrete, and upon this you are ready to piece together your cinderblock wall. Following the foundation comes framing and promptly thereafter the roof - it’s a race to protect everything else from the weather. Plumbing and electrical must precede drywall. Windows, siding, then trim. Gutters, shutters, paint. Light fixtures, outlet covers, appliances. It’s the stuff of HGTV shows that make up the manifestation of a human right or, rather, its deprivation for millions. To my neighbor flying a sign in our Kroger parking lot, the abundance of construction in our neighborhood must feel so cruel: we’ve got housing galore, but it is not for you.
I have worked in the homelessness sector my entire career. Stumbling into it straight from a progressive divinity school, it comes naturally to locate the job within a social justice movement, as I was trained from the start. It is something about the mundanity of the materials and process by which one erects the physical structures of housing, therefore, that invokes such cognitive dissonance when juxtaposed against the despair characterizing our field these days. That a simple constitution of pine boards is so unachievable for so many of my neighbors. It cannot be true that we fail each other and our own humanity because it’s just too tricky to screw enough two-by-fours together.
Housing is the principal driver of wealth accumulation. The equity homeowners enjoy passes from one generation to the next, uniquely expanding in value over time. And because homeownership was legally restricted to white folks for generations, and continues to be protected for whiteness, the commodification of housing is a function of white supremacy and therefore a monument to the capitalist class. That homelessness rose 18% last year is a natural result of racialized capitalism.
On June 28th, 2024, when the US Supreme Court effectively endorsed the criminalization of homelessness in its ruling on City of Grants Pass, Oregon v. Gloria Johnson, it advertised its longstanding reverence for the American caste system. It signaled the disposability of people who are homeless, extending the arm of the carceral state to disappear people through a reproduction of Jim Crow. Shortly thereafter, so-called progressive Governor Gavin Newsom ordered the destruction of encampments on state property and threatened to withhold funding from municipalities that refused to do likewise. His actions displayed how homelessness pertains more to structural racism than partisan ideologies because it is more important to protect white property than Black, Brown, and Indigenous people struggling to survive. Indeed, the very function of the police is to barricade and multiply white wealth, which requires everyone else to labor or to be removed from society altogether.
The non-conservative majority of the so-called movement to end homelessness insists that homelessness is a housing problem. This talking point is necessary because too many believe that homelessness exists because of individual shortcomings, addiction, and mental health struggles. This week’s executive order displays this racist lie in barely coded terms. Addiction is an individual risk factor for homelessness, but most people who have lived experience with it, like I do, are stably housed; housing is the distinction. Homelessness is about an inability to pay the rent, regardless of what conditions make rent-money so hard to come by or how astronomical the rent is in the first place. And because that’s true, the principle policy priority for ending homelessness is preserving and building accessible and affordable housing at scale. This notwithstanding the futility of coerced treatment - it would be years between the intervention my family staged to confront my alcohol abuse and my final glass. It’s that simple.
It is also not that simple. Abolitionist analysis can feel like being an annoying eight-year-old, stubbornly retorting but why. Homelessness exists because housing is out of reach - but why? Why do we collectively refuse to ensure access to safe and stable housing?
A deeper truth: the reason our society fails to invest in the housing infrastructure we need to ensure everyone has a safe place to sleep at night has nothing to do with lumber or copper. It even has little to do with funding - the state can bankroll mass detention camps whenever capitalists demand. Capitalism chooses to withhold housing as a human right because of caste, underwritten in the so-called United States by anti-Black racism. The system is designed to protect the property and wealth of the overwhelmingly white elite class, which requires the exploitation of mostly Black and Brown working people and an underclass of untouchables. Homelessness is a choice, indeed, but not one selected by people who experience it; it is the choice of the hydra of human domination, what bell hooks called imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. This is what we (should) mean when we talk about racism as a driver of homelessness: it is not just that it accounts for the mere mathematics of overrepresentation. Racism is the very system of economic and colonial violence that renders class hierarchy in the first place.
The same minds behind the devastating executive order to expand forced treatment and incarceration of unhoused people are often the ones who claim that homelessness is a spiritual problem, rather than a housing problem. They are right for the wrong reasons. When they say it, they tend to mean that individuals living in the camp around the corner are spiritually bereft themselves, that their sinful choices invited their plight. More often than not, the bastardized morality to which they refer represents Christian imperialism - the same ideology starving Palestine. This assessment is false.
That which is spiritual is that which pertains to spirit, the thing behind the thing. Spirit is poetic (and nontheistic, for me) language to assert, on an individual level, that who I am exists apart from how the molecules that constitute my body are configured at any given moment. This, too, is how I make sense of abstractions like structures and systems: our collective is a body itself. The spirituality of homelessness, then, reflects the decay of our collective personhood. It has to do with the immaterial conditions behind the material components of housing and capitalists’ withholding of it. It represents our shame for the violent origins of this country, which inflicted a wound on humanity itself. That unrepented violence festers on our spirit so long as we fail to heal it, which we actively refuse to do. An end to homelessness, then, will require spiritual revolution, corresponding with and identical to the political revolution necessary to dismantle capitalism. And the earth cries out for it.
The sort of revolution we need will ask us to reconsider what our responsibilities are to one another as human beings, and, indeed, what it means to be human in the first place. Will we decide to protect one another as if our lives depended on it (they do) or reinforce the caste system that makes it so easy to prioritize genocide over homes? We need repair. We need reparations. And sure, we need more assemblage of beams and bricks and linoleum and shingles and insulation and glass. But what stands in the way of us configuring these materials as housing for all is the life or death of our spirit.
