From the Editor I remember my first apartment. Not my first home, where I was born, but the first (and only) place I lived by myself, that I was solely responsible for taking care of and paying for. When I was a student in divinity school, for a while my portly tuxedo cat and I lived in a tiny one-bedroom, ground floor apartment in the West Rock neighborhood of New Haven, Connecticut. The only place to put the fridge was smack dab in the middle of the living room (which was fine, I didn’t have a TV anyway.) It was right next to a concert venue, and on weekend evenings I could hear loud music late into the night—plus the sounds of drunken undergraduates trying to climb the fire escape outside of my windows. We briefly had a flea infestation. A month before I moved out, the water utility company seized all my landlord’s rents because she hadn’t been paying her bills. In other words, it was perfect. In her essay for this season’s issue of A Matter of Spirit, Melina Rudman writes about our homes as containers, “full of memory, energy, dreams, decisions, and their consequences. [They are] like a book still being written; holding the stories of our lives in words and illustrations, changing and evolving as we do.” This was the wonder and magic I found in that first apartment. And yet, it is almost impossible to think about how much I found my first home a sanctuary and then look away from the fact that, on any given night, more than 7,000 people in Washington State have no shelter at all. In fact, to afford the average two-bedroom apartment in Washington requires a full-time wage of over $41 per hour. Pope Francis sharply names the tension between our love of home and the often-ignored fact that housing is so inaccessible to so many people. “We live in cities that throw up skyscrapers and shopping centres and strike big real estate deals,” he said at the 2014 World Meeting of Popular Movements, “but they abandon a part of themselves to marginal settlements on the periphery.” Pope Francis also had something to say about the language we use to avoid reckoning with that tension. “While [cities] offer wellbeing and innumerable pleasures for a happy minority, housing is denied to thousands of our neighbours, our brothers and sisters including children, who are called elegant names such as ‘street people’ or ‘without fixed abode’ or ‘urban camper,’” he said. “In general, what lurks behind each euphemism is a crime.” The articles in this issue of A Matter of Spirit take on Pope Francis’ mandate to ensure that all of our siblings have housing. Melina Rudman opens the issue with a meditation on the spiritual dimensions of home: what it means to be at home in ourselves, in our communities, and in a nation that can feel increasingly unrecognizable. The Low Income Housing Institute (LIHI) traces the decade-long journey from Seattle’s 2
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LIHI Tiny House village, Seattle, WA opened in 2015
Pope Francis sharply names the tension between our love of home and the often-ignored fact that housing is so inaccessible to so many people… “We live in cities that throw up skyscrapers and shopping centres and strike big real estate deals, but they abandon a part of themselves to marginal settlements on the periphery.”
first tiny house village (pictured above) to Good Shepherd House, a seven-story permanent supportive housing building on the same church property. Mercy Housing Northwest (MHNW) tells the story of Gardner House, an affordable housing community in Seattle. And Catholic Community Services of Western Washington (CCSWW), the largest Catholic Charities in the country, reminds us that housing alone is rarely enough and that people also need stability, community, and care. Francis called for urban integration to solve the housing crisis—not eradication, not cosmetics, not elegant euphemisms for abandonment. There is room: The communities in these pages are making it. The question this issue leaves with us is whether we will join in. —Emily Sanna, Editor