Dear Friends,
In my last Contact piece, I mentioned that I was going to spiritualize my daily task of driving kinds to school. My hope was that by turning drive into a spiritual event I would be transformed into some kind of stalwart spiritual being, with a soul deeply rooted in the divine. That hasn’t happened yet (though there are still a few weeks left in Lent), but I have tried to notice the world outside the windows of the car, and as a result, I’ve been paying special attention to a community of homeless folks near the school my daughter Nellie attends on International Boulevard. This particular community is at the intersection of 22nd Avenue and 12th Street. It is bisected by the start of the 23rd Avenue onramp to 880, which I take en route to the schools my other children attend.
Now, I realize that there is nothing newsworthy about homelessness in the Bay Area, but I’ve been driving by this particular community since 2014, and in that time the community has grown significantly—I’d guess it has gone from ten people to more than two hundred people—and it is becoming more permanent. At first it was a tent encampment. Now the folks living in the community are starting to build structures. Some residents are parking cars in improvised driveways. One of the trees now boasts a treehouse for the enjoyment of the community’s younger members. A tenant has posted a “No Trespassing” sign near the entrance to one of the makeshift residences.
Here is why I think this is significant. I have spent enough time living and traveling and working in Latin America to know a shanty town when I see it, and what I’ve been observing over four years of passing by this particular homeless community is a transition from a temporary encampment to the kind of permanent, profoundly impoverished neighborhood found in cities like Santo Domingo, Dakar, and Mumbai.
We talk a lot about homelessness here in the Bay Area. We ask a lot of questions about solutions to the region’s homelessness crisis, and so far answers that lead to solutions have been hard to come by. But the time is fast approaching—and may already be here—when we are going to have to start asking a new set of questions in search of a new set of solutions.
No longer will it be enough to ask questions about housing people staying in tent encampments. We will now have to start asking questions about how to address the needs of folks living in permanent housing that is improvised, has no permits and no access to water, sewer or electricity. Such housing is dangerous for residents, it is a public health hazard, and it works to create a perpetual economic underclass; but such neighborhoods also feel more like home for those who live in them, which makes it hard to get people out of shanties and into safe dwellings.
I suppose the first question we need to ask is whether or not we want the Bay Area’s cities to be organized after the model of urban areas in the developing world, with wealthy enclaves and permanent shanties. If the answer is no, then we have work to do. May God give us strength to ask the right questions, and may God give us the imaginations necessary to find solutions.
God’s Peace,
Ben