This article I think highlights why affordable housing is such a critical piece to the homelessness crisis. And also dispels another myth as to who ends up living on the streets. I have heard the myth that unhoused people just need to work - or that if we
just solve the problem of living wages that it will magically fix the housing shortage. But that doesn't take into account people who are disabled & reliant on disability benefits to survive.
This article, along with the discussion at Friday's provider meeting around dehumanizing language we use to refer to particular encampments, underscores for me the importance of language and how we talk about our unhoused/unsheltered members of our community, even among those of us who are working to provide resources to them. I invite us to consider what images and feelings our words evoke when talk about the unhoused - among ourselves, and especially with the wider community. A huge obstacle to our work is the dehumanization of folks living on the street (I'm thinking especially of all those NIMBYs from Monday's public comment meeting on the proposed camping ban), whether that is *because* they live on the street, or the circumstances that led to their living on the street. Maybe we do ourselves and our mission a disservice when we use the language of "camping" to refer to our unsheltered neighbors? Especially here in the PNW where camping is such a ubiquitous leisure activity? It really doesn't drive home the idea that living unsheltered really carries life or death consequences.
"The point in this life is not simply to 'become somebody,' but to become who we were each intended to be when we first entered this world." - Michael Meade
The 8th Principle Project - “We, the member congregations of the Unitarian Universalist Association, covenant to affirm and promote: journeying toward spiritual wholeness by working to build a diverse multicultural Beloved Community by our actions that accountably dismantle racism and other oppressions in ourselves and our institutions.”