A homeless man, woman, or child needs a bed, a roof, a meal—and typically a lot besides. Just as home means something greater than the presence of these three, homelessness is much more than their absence.
New research, the first study of its kind, delves into the work faith-based organizations do in service to the homeless. The difference between housing someone and ministering to “the whole person” is hard, probably impossible, to measure. But by collecting federal data from the Department of Housing and Urban Development and gathering self-reported numbers from faith-based organizations ministering to the homeless in eleven American cities, authors Byron Johnson and William Wubbenhorst at Baylor University’s Institute for Studies of Religion determined these “FBOs” offer most of the emergency shelter beds in Atlanta, Baltimore, Denver, Houston, Indianapolis, Jacksonville, Omaha, Phoenix, Portland, San Diego, and Seattle.
“The unfortunate reality is that there are precious little studies like this one,” said Johnson, during the results’ big reveal at the National Press Club on Wednesday morning. Accurate and serviceable data collection, not to mention the quantifiable successes of ministry to the homeless, will require a more complete collaboration between faith-based organizations and federally-supported housing programs. Assessing the Faith-Based Response to Homelessness in America: Findings from Eleven Cities is just the beginning.
“HUD does a ton of research, but if you read the HUD research, it doesn’t mention faith-based organizations,” Johnson told me. The organizations that he and his coauthor studied are hardly obscure—some, like the Salvation Army and Jewish Family Services, have been around for nearly a century and a half. “What we’re trying to say is these groups are doing a lot of good. We need to do a lot more.”
“With systematic evaluation, you can figure out where there blind spots are, and how they can improve.” Bringing these organizations’ successes and drawbacks to HUD’s attention shouldn’t be hard.
With Dr. Ben Carson’s confirmation nearly at hand, a more “holistic” approach to investing in human capital, as Dr. Carson put it, should be on the horizon—and it should lead to greater cooperative efforts between HUD and these faith-based programs. In his testimony to the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee, Carson committed his support for a “holistic” approach to poverty and homelessness, social ailments for which there is one-size-fits-all simple fix.
The political timing, Tennessee senator Bob Corker noted, couldn’t be better for Johnson and Wubbenhorst’s research to reach the right audience. “Now we’re in a new era with lots of needs and tremendous opportunity,” Corker said, “So whoever eighteen months ago thought of putting this together and getting Baylor University involved in this certainly had some presence of mind.” Dr. Carson’s chief of staff, who’s also heading to HUD, attended the study’s formal release and has already taken its findings to the boss—so, indeed, “there may be some receptivity,” Johnson told me. Further productive research along these lines would be right up the alley of a holistic HUD.
Plus, the runaway spending watchdogs among us will also take heed. In these eleven cities alone, the work of faith-based organizations rehabilitating the homeless has an estimated value of $119 million. Because, per Wubbenhorst, “An employed person contributes income tax to the tax base, sales tax. Someone with better health incurs fewer health costs. Someone who can raise their own child needs fewer children in foster care.” For programs that cost $91.7 million to run, $12.7 million comes from the federal government. Counting by souls or counting by taxpayers’ pennies, the return on investment is remarkable.
The federally supported best practice Housing First policies do not, as such, consistently comport with the work of these religious organizations. You might call these shops “Housing-Plus”—in which “plus” comprises a structured fellowship and an optional, or mandatory, chapel service.
Critics of faith-based organizations focus on their proselytizing: Herb Johnson, who heads up the San Diego Rescue Mission, told a story of a legal snafu—a lawsuit brought by an advocacy group—which he could have avoided if he’d agreed to “take the Bibles out of the building.” Not a chance: “Without the bible, we’d just be a hotel for homeless people.” (Thanks to the Gideons, they’d actually have far fewer Bibles than a hotel but that’s neither here nor there.)
Herb will be the first to tell you what a melting pot of lost souls finds its way to the Mission’s long term recovery housing: “We have Jews, atheists, and Muslims,” he said, “And they all go to chapel twice a day. They don’t have to jump up and down and shout. They don’t have to profess anything—but they’ve got to show up.” Learn how to show up, to paraphrase Woody Allen, and you’re eighty-percent of the way there.
The Reverend Andy Bales, minister to Los Angeles’ skid row, runs the Union Rescue Mission. Chapel attendance is optional there, but they do impose extrinsic structure with expectations for chaste behavior. Often, Bales said, if someone begins addiction recovery at his mission and then moves on to a Housing First facility “where alcohol flows free” they’ll flock back to URM, fearing for their sobriety: “The buildings are built, the supporting services don’t come along.”
To paraphrase the good book, Man shall not live on public housing alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.
But it’s less scripture than a common faith in the human spirit propelling this notion that housing alone can’t cut it. As ever, the best social science can do is nail down with data, qualitative or quantitative, what we thinking, feeling humans of earth already know but have ignored, to our detriment, because it’s unfashionable or politically inconvenient. Such as the idea that homeless people, just like the rest of us, need sustaining social supports. At the root of their troubles, there’s a greater loss than four walls and a roof.
